[7][8] Taylor attended Auburn University at Montgomery for his undergraduate studies,[2] and then joined a graduate biochemistry program, and after leaving in 2016 began a career in creative writing.
[14][15][16] In an interview for the Booker Prizes, Taylor said his influences were Mavis Gallant, André Aciman, Jane Austen, Alice Munro, Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop, Hilton Als, Pat Conroy and Ann Petry.
"[23] According to the review of Real Life by Jeremy O. Harris in The New York Times, "It is a curious novel to describe, for much of the plot involves excavating the profound from the mundane.
"[24] Michael Arceneaux wrote in Time: "Taylor's book isn't about overcoming trauma or the perils of academia or even just the experience of inhabiting a black body in a white space, even as Real Life does cover these subjects.
[32] A June 2023 article published in The Guardian reported that Taylor was working on novels entitled Group Show and Other Years, as well as a Southern Gothic project called Kinfolks.
He stated in the article that he had found the process of writing Kinfolks particularly daunting, as it represented his first fictional foray into the rural environments of his youth.
[5] From 2021 to 2023, Taylor read all 20 novels in Émile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart cycle after being commissioned to write a piece on the series for the London Review of Books.
In the ensuing article, Taylor acknowledged how he deeply identified with the depiction of alcohol dependence portrayed in the novel L'Assommoir, likening it to the behavior he observed in his parents as a child.
In the piece, he wrote: The Assommoir is the most accurate, brutal depiction of the reality of alcoholism I have ever read, capturing too the strange, evil joviality that warps all the relationships in such a household.
I found the book eerie and painful, and I wept at the end when Gervaise started to show physical symptoms similar to those I saw in my mother and father: the clumsiness, the persistent lack of memory, the tremors at all hours of the day.