Peter taylor author biography

“Splendid. . . . McAlexander’s biography only makes it clearer than ever that Peter Taylor was our last great southern man of letters.”—Chicago Tribune


“For those of us to whom Taylor’s writing is among the chief glories of 20th-century American literature, Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life has much to tell us about how he emerged from what he called ‘the small old world we knew...in Tennessee’ and explored that world with such acuity, clarity, and unsentimental love.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World


“McAlexander has done a splendid job of tracing the progression of Taylor’s writing through the circumstances of a surprisingly frenetic life...Anyone interested in the evolution of fiction writing in the last century will be delighted to come upon this volume...fascinating, sometimes amusing, and often heartbreaking.”—New York Times Book Review


Hubert H. McAlexander’s accomplished portrait of Peter Taylor (1917–1994) achieves a remarkable intimacy with this central figure in the history of the American short story and one of the greatest southern writers of his time. McAlexander knits together the facts of Taylor’s life in a compelling, seamless account: his deep and distinguished family roots in Tennessee; his close bonds with writers from three generations, including


Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and James Alan McPherson; his establishment of the dysfunctional family as a force in American literature; and his perseverance as a writer, finally rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize at age seventy. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, Peter Taylor presents a vivid picture of the man, the artist, and his literary milieu.

Peter Taylor was born on January 8, 1917, in the small community of Trenton, Tennessee. The Taylor family moved several times during Peter’s childhood. While he was still a teenager, his family moved first to Nashville, Tennessee, then to St. Louis, Missouri, finally stopping in Memphis in 1936. Hit hard by the Great Depression, Peter’s father, who was a lawyer, had to move where he could find work. Taylor enrolled in Southwestern (Rhodes College) in 1936 and began studying under Allen Tate. On a suggestion from Tate, he transferred to Vanderbilt the following year to study writing under John Crowe Ransom. When Ransom left to teach at Kenyon College in Ohio, Peter Taylor decided to follow him. There he found kindred spirits in fellow writers Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. Just before the beginning of WWII, Taylor and Lowell moved to Louisiana State to continue studying English under Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Taylor grew up in a political and literary environment in the celebrated Tennessee governor’s race of 1886 dubbed the “War of the Roses”. Taylor’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and grand-uncle all vied for the top spot. His grandfather, Robert Love Taylor, who won the governorship that year, was also a writer, as is his third-cousin, Robert. Both Peter and Robert Taylor have written about their famous family, the first in In the Tennessee Country and the second in Fiddle and Bow.

In 1940, Peter Taylor was drafted into the army, where he served for five years. Before he was to be stationed in England in 1943, he married the poet Eleanor Ross, who is still publishing, her last work of poetry, Late Leisure, appearing in 1999. Upon his return to the states, Taylor began teaching at universities all over the country: the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Kenyon College, Ohio State, Harvard, and the University of Virginia. He lived and taught in Charlottesville fro

English geographer

For other people named Peter Taylor, see Peter Taylor (disambiguation).

Peter James TaylorFBA FAcSS (born 21 November 1944) is an Englishgeographer. Born in Calverton in Nottinghamshire, he was Professor of Political Geography at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne between 1970 and 1996, before joining Loughborough University as Professor of Geography He is the co-founding editor of the journal Political Geography, and is the founder and director of the Globalization and World Cities Research Network and is the author of over 300 publications, of which over 60 have been translated into other languages. In September 2010, he became a Professor of Geography at Northumbria University.

In 2004, Taylor was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy.

Publications

• International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities (2011)
• Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State, Locality (2011)
• Global Urban Analysis: a Survey of Cities in Globalization (2010)
• Cities in Globalization (2006)
• World City Network: a Global Urban Analysis (2004)
• Modernities: a Geohistorical Introduction (1999)
• The Way the Modern World Works: from World Hegemony to World Impasse (1996)

References

External links