Taylor was born in
Trenton, Tennessee, to
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 father's father, Colonel Robert Zachary Taylor, had fought for the
Confederate Army as a private under
Nathan Bedford Forrest. When working in 1908 as an attorney for the West Tennessee Land Company, which had bought interests in property at
Reelfoot Lake, he was kidnapped with attorney Quentin Rankin in October and shot by
night riders, who were harassing and intimidating people associated with the company. Initially reported as killed, Taylor escaped by swimming across the lake. Rankin was shot and hanged the same night. 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. 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. After a
gap year in which he traveled to England, 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 continue studying with the great American
critic and poet
John Crowe Ransom at
Kenyon College in
Gambier, Ohio. Poet
Robert Lowell from Boston was also enrolled there and they became lifelong friends. Taylor also befriended
Robert Penn Warren,
Randall Jarrell,
Katherine Anne Porter,
Jean Stafford,
James Thackara,
Robie Macauley and other significant literary figures of the time. 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. Taylor also wrote three novels, including
A Summons to Memphis in 1986, for which he won the 1987
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and
In the Tennessee Country in 1994. Taylor taught literature and writing at Kenyon and at the
University of Virginia. He was married for fifty-one years to the poet
Eleanor Ross Taylor and died in
Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1994. His papers are held at the
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the
University of Virginia. He was a Charter member of the
Fellowship of Southern Writers. He corresponded with literary critic
M. Bernetta Quinn.
Library of America published a two-volume
Complete Stories in 2017. == Works ==