Peter Taylor (writer)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor (January 8, 1917 – November 2, 1994) was a U.S. author and writer.
Born in Trenton, Tennessee to a wealthy Nashville family, Taylor spent his early childhood between in Nashville and St. Louis until his father, an attorney, moved his practice to Memphis in 1936. Taylor enrolled at Rhodes College in 1936, studying under the critic Allen Tate. Tate encouraged Taylor to transfer to Vanderbilt University, from which he left to continue studying with the great American critic, John Crowe Ransom, at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, along with the poet Robert Lowell. He was also friends with Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, and other significant literary figures of the time.
Considered to be one of the finest American short story writers, Taylor's fictional milieu is the urban South. His characters, usually middle or upper class people, often are living in a time of change and struggle to discover and define their roles in society.
Peter Taylor also wrote three novels, including A Summons to Memphis in 1986, for which he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and In the Tennessee Country in 1994. His collection The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985) won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Taylor taught literature and writing at Kenyon and the University of Virginia. He was married for fifty-one years to the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, and died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1994.
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Short Stories
- A Long Fourth and Other Stories, introduction by Robert Penn Warren, Harcourt, 1948.
- The Widows of Thornton (includes a play), Harcourt, 1954, reprinted, Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
- Happy Families Are All Alike: A Collection of Stories, Astor Honor, 1959.
- Miss Leonora When Last Seen and Fifteen Other Stories, Astor Honor, 1963.
- The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, Farrar, Straus, 1969.
- In the Miro District and Other Stories, Knopf, 1977.
- The Old Forest and Other Stories, Dial, 1985.
- The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, Knopf, 1993.
Novels
- A Woman of Means, Harcourt, 1950; reprinted, Frederic C. Beil, 1983, Picador, 1996.
- A Summons to Memphis, Knopf, 1986.
- In the Tennessee Country, Knopf, 1994.
Plays
- Tennessee Day in St. Louis, Random House, 1959.
- A Stand in the Mountains, published in Kenyon Review, 1965; reprinted, Frederic C. Beil, 1985.
- Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces (contains "Two Images," "A Father and a Son," "Missing Person," "The Whistler," "Arson," "A Voice through the Door," and "The Sweethearts"), Houghton, 1973.
(Editor with Robert Lowell and Robert Penn Warren) Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965, Farrar, Straus, 1967.
(Editor) The Road and Other Modern Stories, Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Peter Taylor Reading and Commenting on His Fiction (audio tape), Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1987.
References
Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life by Hubert H. McAlexander, Louisiana State University Press, 2001
