Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life

In Peter Taylor, an impressively researched and engagingly written biography, Hubert McAlexander weaves together the facts and fiction of Taylor's life and creates a vivid canvas of the man, the artist, and his cultural and literary milien. This book chronicles Taylor's unusually balanced existence and a stable fifty-year marriage to poet Eleanor Ross Taylor amid the emotional wreckage of perhaps the most self-destructive generation in American literary history. It explores Taylor's major contributions to three generations of American literature - he virtually established the dysfunctional family as a major subject in American fiction, he was among the first era of writers to earn a living in the academic world and became a model teacher-writer, and he persevered through various writing movements and literary fashions. This book shows Taylor emerge as a major writer under the aegis of the New Yorker, persevere over the decades, and finally win public recognition with the Pulitzer Prize at age seventy for his novel A Summons to Memphis.