Peter Taylor (1917–1994) was the author of numerous short story collections, novels, and plays, including In the Tennessee Country (Knopf, 1994); The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court (Knopf, 1993); A Summons to Memphis (Knopf, 1986), winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, the 1987 Ritz Hemingway Award, and Italy’s Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Literary Prize; The Old Forest and Other Stories (Doubleday, 1985), winner of the 1986 PEN/Faulkner Award; In the Miro District and Other Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), winner of the 1978 Gold Medal for the Short Story from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969); and A Long Fourth and Other Stories (Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1948). Taylor’s stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and other magazines. He received wide recognition through grants and awards during his career, including a 1950 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a 1952 grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He received the 1993 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, a 1985 Governor’s Award for the Arts from the Commonwealth of Virginia, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He concluded a long teaching career as the Henry Hoynes Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia and lived in Charlottesville with his wife, the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, from 1967 until his death.  

Photo by John Thompson