Background
Taylor was born in Trenton, Tennessee, United States on July 8, 1917.
( In 1916, a young boy, Nathan Longfort, is on the funera...)
In 1916, a young boy, Nathan Longfort, is on the funeral train bearing the body of his grandfather, the Senator, from Washington, D.C., to Knoxville, Tennessee. The memory of this journey will haunt him for the rest of his life. On this trip, he meets the enigmatic Cousin Aubrey, a man of "irregular kinship," the black sheep of the Longfort clan. As the years pass, and Aubrey disappears into the world, Nathan begins to compulsively collect rumors about his faraway life?as Nathan's mother's first true love, a charmer of European society, a Don Juan, a worldly success?and sees it in stinging contrast to his own unfulfilled dreams of becoming an artist. Much later in life, the two men?now old?will meet again.
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Taylor was born in Trenton, Tennessee, United States on July 8, 1917.
He received his B. A. degree in 1940 from Kenyon College, where he was closely associated with the older poet and critic John Crowe Ransom and two gifted fellow students, the poets Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell.
Following service in World War II, he taught at such institutions as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Kenyon, and Harvard University, before becoming a professor of English at the University of Virginia in 1967.
Beginning with A Long Fourth and Other Stories in 1948, collections of Taylor's stories, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine, were published at regular intervals over a 40-year period. While he long enjoyed a reputation as a superb craftsman, it was only after the publication of The Old Forest and Other Stories in 1985 that he became widely acclaimed.
In 1993 he published The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, a collection of 11 tales and three one-act plays. One of these tales, "Cousin Aubrey, " he expanded into the novel In the Tennessee Country (1994), a story about the "lost men" of Tennessee. Taylor's best stories resemble miniature novels of manners. Leisurely in pace and often retrospective in point of view, they explore from many angles the ramifications of a crisis, major or minor, that has erupted in an otherwise well-ordered family. In "The Old Forest, " a well-intentioned young man, engaged to an attractive and highly conventional society girl, goes for an indiscreet drive on a wintry afternoon with a young woman from the amorphous class of working girls known to his set as the "demimondaines. " An accident occurs, the girl flees in the snow, and soon the whole Memphis "establishment" is involved in the search for her whereabouts. The reader is left with the feeling that an entire society, with all its spoken and unspoken assumptions, has been encompassed. The conflict between generations, especially between fathers and sons, seems to have a special poignancy for Taylor and powerfully informs such works as the short stories "Porte Cochere, " "In the Miro District, " and "The Gift of the Prodigal, " and the novel A Summons to Memphis.
(One of the most celebrated novels of its time, the Pulitz...)
( In 1916, a young boy, Nathan Longfort, is on the funera...)
His most characteristic stories concern the affluent lawyers, bankers, and well-born cotton brokers who, with their country-club wives, their debutante daughters, and their sometimes wayward or otherwise unsatisfactory sons, constitute Tennessee "society. "
Leisurely in pace and often retrospective in point of view, they explore from many angles the ramifications of a crisis, major or minor, that has erupted in an otherwise well-ordered family.
He was married for fifty-one years to the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.