Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor

For other people named Peter Taylor, see Peter Taylor.

Peter Taylor at Kenyon College, 1941. Photo by Robie Macauley. This photo ("That doleful Kenyon snapshot") is the subject of Robert Lowell's poem, "For Peter Taylor".

Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor (January 8, 1917 – November 2, 1994) was a U.S. author and writer.

Biography

Peter Taylor and Eleanor Ross Taylor, 1946.

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. 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, James Thackara, 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.

Short stories

Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Peter Taylor in front of The Presbytere at Jackson Square, New Orleans in 1941.

• 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.

Further reading

• Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life by Hubert H. McAlexander, Louisiana State University Press, 2001
• "Peter Taylor: The Undergraduate Years at Kenyon," by Hubert H. McAlexander, The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 3/4 (Summer - Autumn, 1999)
• Inventory of the Peter Taylor papers at Vanderbilt University, http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/speccol/pdf/taylor_peter.pdf