"A century from now," novelist Anne Tyler suggested in a 26 January 1985 USA Today article, "when our descendants look back and marvel at our ignorance, they might very well mention the relative lack of homage we paid to Peter Taylor. He is, after all,...

During the last fifteen years of his life--capping a fifty-seven-year publishing career--Peter Taylor was awarded the Gold Medal for the short story from the American Institute of Arts and Letters (1978), a National Endowment for the Arts senior...

The territory Peter Taylor staked out for himself may be summed up easily and neatly enough. His characters are primarily upper-middle-class and upper-class people from the upper, as opposed to the "deep," south, living in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Just...

Three decades ago the name of Peter Taylor was as unknown to me as it was to all save a handful of Americans. Yet in the fall of 1964, as I set up residence in the Piedmont North Carolina city of Greensboro, it seemed...

[The] limitations Mr. Taylor sets on his work barely contain the shifting, probing attitude he constantly turns on his material. He is a great craftsman, but of a foxy sort, intent on working as much complexity as possible into the world behind his simple surfaces. In his best stories, his masterpieces, every detail is present in all its vital controversy; every part hums with its own inner fullness, as well as in its relation to every other part. He is a master of contradiction, though we have only to ment...

[In Presences, Taylor has selected] the ghost play as the genre which will best permit him to objectify some of the prevailing influences he senses in his characters' lives. In reading these dramas, however, with full awareness of Taylor's prior accomplishments, we note two other kinds of "presences" emerge as well: the first, as palpable as any characters on the stage, are those remembered Taylor traits of theme and technique which are again embodied in these very plays; the sec...

Mr. Taylor knows his own limitations. We can see this most obviously if we notice how homogeneous is the body of work he has been willing to put into book form. His characteristic product is the leisurely and, within its genre, fairly lengthy short story. (p. 561) When the history of an earlier time enters a Taylor story, it always enters in a way that he could have experienced it—that is, as reading or legend or old folks' talk…. [The] actual self-limitation that Mr. Taylor operates un...