Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.

The eldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father was a chemist and her mother a social worker. Her early childhood was spent in a succession of Quaker communities in the mountains of North Carolina and in Raleigh. She didn't attend a school until she was 11 and this unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise".

She graduated at 19 from Duke University, and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University in New York City. She worked as a librarian and bibliographer before moving to Maryland.

She is noteworthy among contemporary best-selling novelists, for she rarely grants face-to-face interviews or does book tours, nor does she make many other public appearances, although she has made herself available through email interviews.

Tyler's ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which she considers her best work, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983. Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. She has edited three anthologies: The Best American Short Stories 1983, Best of the South, and Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade.

Matthew Theron Ruff (born September 8, 1965 in Queens, New York) is an American author of thriller, science-fiction and comic novels.

Ruff grew up in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan; one of his teachers there was the memoirist Frank McCourt. He graduated from Cornell University in 1987.

The author's first novel, Fool on the Hill, is a fantasy that drew on his experiences living in Risley Residential College at Cornell. Published shortly after Ruff graduated from the university, it gained an early cult following which continues to this day.

His second book Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy is postcyberpunk; it helped him to become a fully settled writer.^{[citation needed]} He became fairly well known not only in the United States, but also in Europe.^{[citation needed]}

His third book Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, focuses on multiple personalities; while not technically science-fiction, it nonetheless contains significant speculative elements^{[citation needed]}. The novel was long-listed for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and won the 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, a PNBA Book Award, and a Washington State Book Award. Ruff is also the recipient of a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose