It's not often that someone finds success with his or her first novel, but Amy Tan did. The Joy Luck Club, which was published in 1989, won the Commonwealth Club gold award for fiction and the American Library Association's best book for young adults. However, Tan did not expect to become a fiction writer when she was young--her mother wanted her to become a neurosurgeon instead.

Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, to two immigrant parents. Her father was a Baptist minister, and her mother was from an upper-class family in Shanghai, China. In her teens, Tan lost both her father and a 16-year-old brother to brain tumors. After this tragedy, Tan's mother moved the family to Switzerland, where Tan finished high school. By then she and her mother were in almost constant conflict. Tan moved back to the U.S. and attended San Jose State in California and then the University of California at Berkeley, where she worked on her graduate studies in linguistics--not the medical training that her mother had wanted for her.

After dropping out of graduate school, Tan and a partner started a technical writing business, and Amy spent as many as 90 hours a week writing technical documents for large corporations. She took up jazz piano and fiction writing as therapy to help her cut back on her workaholic tendencies. After her first successful novel, Tan wrote The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), two children's books--The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994)--and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001). In spite of suffering chronic debilitating effects of Lyme disease, Tan has continued to publish fiction. Her latest novel, The Valley of Amazement, was published in 2013.

Many of Tan's early works dealt with the relationships between Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters. In fact, it wasn't until Amy visited China and met two stepsisters from her mother's previous marriage that she began to fully understand her mother and her own heritage.