Peter Taylor

<p>Some years before Peter Taylor’s death in 1994 the tacit agreement was made that Hubert McAlexander would be the author’s biographer. Peter Taylor McAlexander’s accomplished portrait achieves for readers a remarkable intimacy with this central figure in the history of the American short story and one of the greatest southern writers of his time.</p><p>Taylor’s life spanned most of the twentieth century a fact borne out in the themes of social and psychic rifts in a modernizing South that dominate his stories plays and novels. McAlexander knits together the facts and fiction of Taylor’s life in a compelling seamless account: his family roots in Tennessee and the ancestral basis for some of his best work; boyhood upheavals to Nashville St. Louis and Memphis and his establishment of the dysfunctional family as a major subject in American literature; his tutelage under poets John Crowe Ransom Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and the development of complex subtle carefully crafted stories as his metier.</p><p>We see Taylor emerge as a major writer under the aegis of the New Yorker persevere over the decades and finally win public recognition with the Pulitzer Prize at age seventy for his novel A Summons to Memphis. A genteel sociable personality Taylor sustained deep lifelong friendships with Robert Lowell Jean Stafford and Randall Jarrell; formed close bonds with three literary generations; and enjoyed fifty-one years of marriage to poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.</p><p>Exhaustively researched and engagingly written Peter Taylor presents a vivid picture of the man the artist and his culture and literary milieu. Anyone drawn to Taylor’s work will savor this superb biography.</p>