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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 study 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!