Peter Taylor (author)

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Peter Hillsman Taylor (January 8, 1917 – November 2, 1994) was an American short-story writer and novelist.

Born to a wealthy Nashville family in Trenton, Tennessee, 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 to study under the critic John Crowe Ransom, and after a year at Vanderbilt Taylor followed Ransom to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, along with student-writers Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell.

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. Taylor's novel A Summons to Memphis won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; his collection The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985) won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Taylor taught literature and writing at Kenyon College and the University of Virginia. He died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1994.