For other people named Peter Taylor, see Peter Taylor.
Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor (January 8, 1917 – November 2, 1994) was a U.S. author and writer.
Contents |
Born in Trenton, Tennessee to a wealthy Nashville family, Taylor spent his early childhood in Nashville. The family moved to St. Louis in 1926 when Taylor's father, lawyer Matthew Hillsman Taylor, became president of the General American Life Insurance Company. In St. Louis, Taylor attended the Rossman School and St. Louis Country Day School. In 1932, the family moved to Memphis, where his father established a law practice. Taylor graduated from Central High School in Memphis in 1935. He wrote his first published piece while there, an interview with actress Katharine Cornell[1]. After a gap year in which he traveled to England, Taylor enrolled at Southwestern at Memphis in 1936, studying under the critic Allen Tate. Tate encouraged Taylor to transfer to Vanderbilt University, which he later left to continue studying with the great American critic and poet 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, Robie Macauley 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 at the University of Virginia.
He was married for fifty-one years to the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor and died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1994.
(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.