Top 10 books about Baltimore
Anne Tyler is indelibly tied to the city, but authors as contrasting as Frederick Douglass and John Waters have shown some of its different faces
When I began writing novels set in my home town of Baltimore, the living writer most identified with the city was Anne Tyler. More than two decades later, that’s still true. Yet Tyler’s books are not about Baltimore per se. The city is her backdrop, not her subject. Tyler would be one of the great American novelists wherever she lived.
She gets Baltimore right, of course, because she’s Anne Tyler. The question, as always with any Baltimore-based story, is which Baltimore? It’s a city of contradictions, as open to interpretation and variation as the best jazz standards.