He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo.

from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University where his teachers included Joseph A. Mazzeo, Steven Marcus, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Sidney Morgenbesser, Michael Wood, Carl Woodring, Quentin Anderson, Frank Kermode, and Edward W. Said.

Taylor's debut novel, Tales Out of School (1995), is set on Galveston Island, Texas in 1907 and revolves around the Mehmels, a once prosperous German-Jewish immigrant family whose fortunes are in decline.

Taylor's second novel, The Book of Getting Even (Steerforth Press, 2008), tells the story of Gabriel Geismar, a young aspiring astronomer who becomes involved with a charismatic but troubled family named Hundert.

The book is the collected correspondence of Canadian-born American author and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and includes Bellow's letters to such authors as William Faulkner, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Robert Penn Warren, J. F. Powers, John Berryman, John Cheever, Karl Shapiro, Wright Morris, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Stanley Elkin, Allan Bloom, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Martin Amis.

Our literature's debt to Taylor, if the culture still cares, is considerable"[6] and New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani chose Letters as one of her "Top Ten Books of 2010.

"[8] Naples Declared was also named a Best Book of 2012 by The New Yorker, where Judith Thurman wrote, "It is a work of voluptuous erudition; a meditation on place and displacement; a paean to the chance encounter—a worldly adventure story...I found it transporting.