Peter Taylor (writer)

[6] After a gap year in which he traveled to England, Taylor enrolled at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) in 1936, studying under the critic Allen Tate.

Tate encouraged Taylor to transfer to Vanderbilt University, which he later left to continue studying with the great American critic and poet John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

Taylor also befriended Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, James Thackara, Robie Macauley and other significant literary figures of the time.

[7] Considered to be one of the finest American short story writers, Taylor made his fictional milieu the urban South, with references to its history.

His characters, usually middle or upper-class people, often are living in a time of change in the 20th century, and struggle to discover and define their roles in society.

Taylor also wrote three novels, including A Summons to Memphis in 1986, for which he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and In the Tennessee Country in 1994.