Peter Taylor

Taylor was born in Trenton, Tennessee, into a prominent political family (his grandfather had been governor) and studied under the Fugitive poets Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt and Kenyon College, forming friendships with Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell that lasted his whole career.

He built his reputation almost entirely on short stories of the vanishing Southern gentry, their manners and rituals concealing real cruelty and loss, before publishing A Summons to Memphis (1986), his first full-length novel, in which an adult son is called home to referee his aging father's unseemly late-life romance and reckon with an old family betrayal; it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

He taught creative writing for decades, principally at the University of Virginia, mentoring generations of writers, and died in 1994, revered as one of the American short story's most precise practitioners.