Peter Taylor

"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.". "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 deep and distinguished 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 awakening as a writer under the tutelage of poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, and the development of complex, subtle, carefully crafted stories - "Compression is everything," Taylor said - as his metier."--BOOK JACKET.

First sentence: "A wedding of wide social interest throughout the state," the Nashville Tennessean called the marriage in Washington on January 8, 1908, of Miss Katherine Baird Taylor, daughter of Tennessee Senator Robert Love Taylor, to Matthew Hillsman Taylor, a promising young lawyer of Trenton.

Year

2001

Language

English

Publisher

Louisiana State University Press

Editions

1

Pages

338

ISBN

9780807129739

Data source: Wikidata