Peter Taylor: The Complete Stories 1938-1992

Description

In a career spanning over half a century, Peter Taylor explored the dramas of a Tennessee gentry struggling with the loss of the old certainties in an Old South becoming new. A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Penn/Faulkner Award and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, he was, in the estimation of Anne Tyler, 'the undisputed master of the short-story form'. For his centennial year, Taylor joins fellow twentieth-century masters such as Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor in the Library of America series with an unprecedented 2-volume edition of his complete short fiction.

Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor (1917-1994) was born in Trenton, Tennessee, and studied with Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom as an undergraduate. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Taylor taught at a number of schools until 1967, when he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, his home for the rest of his life. In 1978 he was awarded the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1993 the PEN/Malamud Award for his lifetime contribution to the art of the short story.

"The undisputed master of the short-story form." --Anne Tyler "Only Eudora Welty has acomplished a body of fiction so rich, durable, and accessible as Taylor's." --Jonathan Yardley "The stories in these volumes define their time and place with an unrivaled precision." --Michael Gorra, in The New York Review of Books