Matthew Hillsman Taylor Jr (1917 - 1994)

Born 8 Jan 1917 in Trenton, Gibson, Tennessee, United States

Ancestors

Husband of Eleanor Lily (Ross) Taylor — married 4 Jun 1943 in Franklin, Tennessee, United States

Died 2 Nov 1994 at age 77 in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States

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Biography

Matthew Taylor Jr is Notable.

Matthew Hillsman Taylor, Jr.[1] born January 8, 1917, known professionally as Peter Taylor, was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright.[2] He wrote frequently about the urban South in his stories and novels.

Taylor was born in Trenton, Tennessee, the fourth child of Matthew Hillsman "Red" Taylor, a prominent attorney who played football at Vanderbilt University in 1904 and '05, and Katherine Baird (Taylor) Taylor. His father was named after Matthew Hillsman, a long-time local Baptist pastor. His grandfather, Colonel Robert Zachary Taylor, had fought for the Confederate Army as a private under Nathan Bedford Forrest.

His mother's father was Robert Love Taylor, a politician and writer from eastern Tennessee who served one term as a US Congressman, and three two-year terms as governor of Tennessee in the 19th century, and as United States Senator from Tennessee from 1907 until his death in 1912.[4]

During his early childhood, Taylor lived with his family in Nashville. The family moved to St. Louis in 1926 when Taylor's father became president of the General American Life Insurance Company. In St. Louis, Taylor attended the Rossman School and St. Louis Country Day School. In 1932, the family moved to Memphis, where his father established a law practice. Taylor graduated from Central High School in Memphis in 1935. He wrote his first published piece while there, an interview with actress Katharine Cornell.[3]

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 get a job selling real estate in Memphis. He continued his studying with the great American critic and poet John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

In June 1941, Taylor is drafted. As a member of a company formed in Memphis, he is stationed for the next two and a half years at Fort Oglethorpe, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1944 he is sent to Camp Tidworth in England. He serves there until 1945 when he is honorably discharged with the rank of Sargent.

In April 1943, Allen Tate introduces Taylor to Eleanor Lilly Ross of Norwood, North Carolina. A graduate of Women’s College of North Carolina at Greensboro, she is then a student at Vanderbilt. After a courtship of six weeks, they are married on 4 June 1943 at St. Andrew’s School chapel near Sewanee, Tennessee, by Father James Harold Flye. Together they had:

1. Katherine Baird Taylor b. 30 September 1948
2. Peter Ross Taylor b. 7 February 1955

In 1946, Taylor accepted a faculty position at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He taught at the University of Virginia from 1967 until his retirement in 1983. Taylor taught literature and writing at Kenyon, and at the University of Virginia.

In the summer of 1974 Taylor had a heart attack at Clover Hill, his eighteenth-century residence outside Charlottesville, Virginia. He survived and continues writing 4 more books. In 1984, he was one of four writers to receive a $25,000 senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, given to recognize individuals who had made an extraordinary contribution to American literature. Again, Taylor suffers a stroke on 24 July 1986, continues writing 5 more books during which time, in 1987, he wins the Ritz Hemingway Prize and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Summons To Memphis. In 1989 he wins the Internal Literary Prize Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore. He was the recipient of several literary prizes, including the $50,000 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award.

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.

His collection The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985) won the PEN/Faulkner Award.

He was married for fifty-one years to the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor and died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1994, and and was buried in Sewanee, Tennessee. His papers [1] are held at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

Short story collections

1. A Long Fourth and Other Stories, introduction by Robert Penn Warren, Harcourt, 1948.
2. The Widows of Thornton (includes a play), Harcourt, 1954, reprinted, Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
3. Happy Families Are All Alike: A Collection of Stories, Astor Honor, 1959.
4. Miss Leonora When Last Seen and Fifteen Other Stories, Astor Honor, 1963.
5. The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, Farrar, Straus, 1969.[8]
6. In the Miro District and Other Stories, Knopf, 1977.
7. The Old Forest and Other Stories, Dial, 1985.
8. The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, Knopf, 1993.

Novels

1. A Woman of Means, Harcourt, 1950; reprinted, Frederic C. Beil, 1983, Picador, 1996.
2. A Summons to Memphis, Knopf, 1986.
3. In the Tennessee Country, Knopf, 1994.

Plays

1. Tennessee Day in St. Louis, Random House, 1959.
2. A Stand in the Mountains, published in Kenyon Review, 1965; reprinted, Frederic C. Beil, 1985.
3. Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces (contains "Two Images," "A Father and a Son," "Missing Person," "The Whistler," "Arson," "A Voice through the Door," and "The Sweethearts"), Houghton, 1973.

Sources

• [1] McAlexander, Hubert H. (September 30, 2001). "Peter Taylor". NY Times.

• [2] Gussow, Mel (4 November 1994). "Peter Taylor, Short-Story Master, Dies at 77". NY Times.

• [3]Alexander, Hubert Horton (2001). Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life. Louisiana State University Press. pp. 1–6. ISBN 0-8071-2973-9.

• [4]Hubert Horton McAlexander, Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life, Southern Literary Studies, LSU Press, 2004 ISBN 0-8071-2973-9

• "Peter Taylor: The Undergraduate Years at Kenyon," by Hubert H. McAlexander, The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 3/4 (Summer - Autumn, 1999)

• Inventory of the Peter Taylor papers at Vanderbilt University, (https://web.archive.org/web/20100620103320/http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/speccol/pdf/taylor_peter.pdf)

• (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1994/11/04/novelist-peter-taylor-dies/8b28a30b-ed5d-477e-8b42-bd891b9de9cb/)

• Tennessee Encyclopedia (https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/peter-hillsman-taylor/)

See Also:

• Wikipedia Peter_Taylor
• Wikidata: Item Q979076, en:Wikipedia