PETER TAYLOR REMEMBERED

Introduction

	Peter Taylor  Photo provided by Ross Taylor

A panel at the The Association of Writers and Writing Programs Annual Conference in Atlanta in March 2007 examined the work of noted master of the short story, Peter Taylor. Joining me as participants were David Lynn, novelist and editor of The Kenyon Review, and John Casey, the award-winning author of the novel Spartina and other work. All of us were fortunate enough to have known Peter and to have enjoyed his company, and we are all admirers of his fiction. Our look at three of his stories thus constitutes appreciation rather than scholarly essay and combines reminiscence and examination.

The essays somewhat formalize the remarks made at the panel and each treats a different story. Mr. Lynn discusses “The Dean of Men” and Mr. Casey “In the Miro District.” I look at “The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court,” which appears in the fiction section of this issue of Blackbird. This story was first published by New Virginia Review, of which I was the editor, in 1992 and was later collected as the title story in the book by the same name and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993.

Peter Taylor was born in Trenton, Tennessee, in 1917. His family had long been prominent in Tennessee politics and social circles, and he came of age in Memphis. He was educated at Southwestern College, where Allen Tate was his freshman composition teacher, Vanderbilt University, where he went to study with John Crowe Ransom and met Randall Jarrell, and graduated from Kenyon College, to which he had followed Ransom, and where his roommate was Robert Lowell. These men became his lifelong friends.

After serving in the military during the Second World War (where he was posted overseas to England, but did not see combat—though in a very Peter-like way, he visited Paris shortly after the liberation where he ran into Gertrude Stein on the street and was taken to her home for tea), Peter returned to a life of writing and made a career of teaching. He is most associated as a teacher with the time he spent at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and at the University of Virginia, though he was deeply peripatetic and taught at a number of places. He died in Charlottesville in 1994.

He is the author of eight collections of stories and three novels. He received the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Old Forest, the Pulitzer Prize for A Summons to Memphis, and numerous other awards and honors.

His wife, the distinguished poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, whom he met through the Tates and whom he married at Sewanee (with Lowell as best man and Tate giving away the bride), still lives in the last house they acquired in Charlottesville. His son Ross Taylor, also a poet, his wife, Elizabeth, and daughter, Mercedes, live in Northern Virginia.

I encourage you to find your way not only to “The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court” here in Blackbird but also to “The Dean of Men,” which can be found in The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, and to “In the Miro District,” which can be found in the book of the same name.

—Mary Flinn  

   Peter Taylor Remembered
   

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