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Peter Hillsman Taylor was born on
January 8, 1917, in the small west Tennessee town of Trenton. In an
effort to maintain solid work as a lawyer during the Great Depression,
Taylor's father moved his family first to Nashville, Tennessee, then St. Louis, Missouri, finally,
in 1936, they settled down in Memphis.
Taylor entered college at
Southwestern, now known as Rhodes college, in Memphis. In his
first year at Southwestern, he met
Allen Tate. It was Tate who encouraged Taylor to transfer to Vanderbilt
and studied under John Crowe Ransom. When Ransom left Tennessee for
Kenyon College in Ohio, Taylor followed him. At Kenyon, he became a
part of a group of closely-knit literary friends that included
Robert
Penn Warren. He and Warren would remain close friends
throughout their lives.
In
1940, Taylor was drafted into the army. He served for five years. In
1943, while still in the military, before going to England, he married
Eleanor Ross, a poet from North Carolina. Once out of the service, he
secured a teaching position at his wife’s alma mater, Woman's College of
the University of North Carolina, at Greensboro. He taught at
Greensboro on three separate stints, but over the course of thirty-seven
years, he taught writing at a variety of colleges and universities
including Kenyon College, Ohio State University, Harvard, and the
University of Virginia, where he retired as Henry Hoynes Professor of
Writing.
His work had appeared in the Southern
Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review.
He enjoyed, or rather readers enjoyed, his long relationship with the
New Yorker. In 1979, he received the Gold Medal for the short story
genre given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
As a dramatist, he authored
Tennessee Day in St. Louis (1957), Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces
(1973) and A Stand in the Mountains (1985).
Having resisted the idea of writing a novel since
The Widows of
Thornton , published in 1954, he published A Summons to
Memphis
[SLR Review] in 1986. This earned him Italy's International
Literary Prize Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore, the Ritz/Hemingway Prize,
and the Pulitzer Prize. The Old Forest and Other Stories, which
won the P.E.N./Faulkner Award in 1986 and Nine of his short stories
were published in the annual Best American Short Stories. Six
stories appeared in the O. Henry Prize collections.
In
1993, he published his eighth short story collection, and in 1994,
though in poor health, he completed his last novel, In the
Tennessee Country.
Taylor was keenly interested in how people survived, adapted, even made
a place for themselves in a new environment. No doubt, his reflection
and interest stemmed from his moves throughout his own childhood. Taylor
explained, "My feelings are both that this region of the upper South is
very much a part of me and that I am very much a part of it," he said in
a Founders Day Address at the University of the South at Sewanee.
"Why a writer should be so egotistical as to have such feelings about a
whole region and so crass as to express these feelings is a mystery.
But nearly everything about art is a mystery and must ever be so, and
yet this is my mystery."
In 1982 he was elected a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1983 he retired
from the University of Virginia. Peters Taylor
died in 1994.
See
SLR's review of Taylor's
A Summons to Memphis! | Be sure to subscribe to our
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