Name Peter Hillsman | Role Novelist | |
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Died November 2, 1994, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States Spouse Eleanor Ross Taylor (m. 1943–1994) Education Kenyon College (1938–1940), Vanderbilt University (1936–1937), Central High School Awards Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Books A Summons to Memphis, A woman of means, The collected stories of, In the Tennessee country, The Oracle at Stoneleig Similar People Eleanor Ross Taylor, Carl Foreman, David Lean, Michael Wilson, William Faulkner | ||
For other people named Peter Taylor, see Peter Taylor.
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Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor (January 8, 1917 – November 2, 1994) was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright.
Biography
He was born in Trenton, Tennessee to Matthew Hillsman "Red" Taylor, a prominent attorney who played football at Vanderbilt University in 1904 and 1905, and Katherine Baird (Taylor) Taylor. His father was named after Matthew Hillsman, a long-time local Baptist pastor. His father's father, Colonel Robert Zachery Taylor, had fought for the Confederate Army as a private under Nathan Bedford Forrest and had almost been killed by night riders near Reelfoot Lake in 1908. His mother's father was Robert Love Taylor, a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1907 until his death in 1912.
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 College (now Rhodes College) in 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 story collections
Novels
Plays
Other
(Editor with Robert Lowell and Robert Penn Warren) Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965, Farrar, Straus, 1967.
Peter Taylor Reading and Commenting on His Fiction (audio tape), Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1987.