Career
Tyler completed his B.A. in Far Eastern Languages at
Harvard University in 1957. He then obtained a master's degree in Japanese history and PhD in Japanese literature at
Columbia University, where he was supervised by
Donald Keene. After teaching at Ohio State, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University Oslo (Norway) became head of the Japan Centre in the faculty of Asian Studies at the
Australian National University in
Canberra. With his wife, Susan Tyler, he retired in 2000 to rural New South Wales. Between 1993 and 2023 the couple bred alpacas on their property near the town of Braidwood. ==Honors==
Selected works and translations
• Japanese Tales, Pantheon, 1987 • French Folktales, Pantheon, 1989 • Japanese Nô Dramas, Penguin, 1990 • The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity, Columbia University Press, 1992 • The Tale of Genji, Viking, 2001 (hardback) and Penguin, 2002 (softcover) • Mistress Oriku: Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Kawaguchi Matsutarô, Tuttle, 2007 • The Glass Slipper and Other Stories by Yasuoka Shôtarô, Dalkey Archive Press, 2008 • The Ise Stories: Ise monogatari, University of Hawai'i Press, 2010 (with Joshua Mostow) • Flowers of Grass by Fukunaga Takehiko, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012 • The Tale of the Heike, Penguin, 2012 • A Great Valley Under the Stars, Isobar Press, 2014 • The Castelvecchio Family, by William R. Tyler (formatted and supplemented), 2014 • From the Bamboo-View Pavilion: Takemuki-ga-ki, Blue-Tongue Books, 2016 • A Reading of The Tale of Genji, Blue-Tongue Books, 2016 • Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams: Twenty Plays from the Noh Tradition, Columbia University Press, 2024 • The Dawn of the Warrior Age: War Tales from Medieval Japan, Columbia University Press, 2024 • A Shattered Realm: Wars and Lives in Fourteenth-Century Japan, Kindle Direct Publishing, 2024 ==References==