Peter Taylor Biography

American short-story writer and novelist, born in Trenton, Tennessee, educated at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Southwestern College, Memphis, and Kenyon College, Ohio. Taylor has explored the tensions and nuances of Tennessee life, particularly in its upper and middle classes. He had published several volumes of short stories prior to Collected Stories (1969). The title stories of In the Miro District and Other Stories (1977) and The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985) are explorations of changing sexual mores in the traditionalist South. Other collections include For Good or Evil (1991), praised for its outrageous black humour, and The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court (1993), the title story of which concerns the irreversible effects on young lives of tarot card predictions and spiritualism. Taylor's art as a short-story writer relates, on his own admission, to a gossip's; anecdotal and attentive to the rhythms of ordinary, educated speech, the tales convey by inference the inner assumptions and confusions of a particular world. A Summons to Memphis (1986; Pulitzer Prize) and his subsequent novels exhibit the same qualities of restraint and subtlety that distinguish the stories. In the Tennessee Country (1994), set in the fading world of US southern aristocracy in the early twentieth century, is narrated by an art historian who is obsessed by his grandfather's illegitimate son.