Robert Lewis Taylor
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Robert Lewis Taylor (24 September 1912 – 30 September 1998) was an American author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1959 for his novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters.
Taylor was born in Carbondale, Illinois and attended Southern Illinois University, which now houses his papers. After college, he became a journalist and won awards for reporting. In 1939, he became a writer for The New Yorker magazine as an author of biographical sketches. Additionally, his work appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest.
From 1942 to 1946, Taylor served in the United States Navy during World War II. During his service, he wrote numerous stories and Adrift in a Boneyard as an extended fiction about survivors of a disaster. In 1949, The Saturday Evening Post commissioned a series of biographical sketches of W. C. Fields. He published them together as W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes. He continued to write biographies, including a biography of Winston Churchill, as well as fiction.
His 1958 novel, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, about a fourteen-year-old and his father in the California gold rush won the Pulitzer Prize and was purchased for a film. Instead, it was made into a TV series. Taylor's 1964 novel, Two Roads to Guadalupe, was also quite successful and was partially autobiographical.
