"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 ...
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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 (19...
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Critical Essay by Morgan Blum
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 char...
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Critical Essay by Richard Howard
Affable, persuasive, never glossy, never hurrying, steadily gaining ground, [the narratives of "The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor"] are not glamorou...
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Critical Essay by William Peden
[It] is time which is perhaps the most important force in Mr. Taylor's short stories, time and the past, a past which is like a ghost definitely uncomfortable i...
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Critical Essay by Christopher Ricks
Peter Taylor offers slices of life. But sliced life often has the vapidity of sliced bread. Nutritious and unsensational. When Mr. Taylor evokes a family quarrel o...
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Critical Essay by Richard Howard
Presences—the achieved works, the "intensely concrete, intensely exhibitional" plays, as James prophesied them to be—are by no means the m...
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Critical Essay by Herschel Gower
[It] is in Middle Tennessee that Peter Taylor has found a setting for many of his stories. It is Nashville, the capitol of the state, that is often his locus operandi...
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Critical Essay by Albert J. Griffith
[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 charact...
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Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
In some Southern regional writing, there is a tendency to bypass the ordinary processes of individual development in favor of an aura of mystery, as if the shape of ...
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Critical Essay by Jane Barnes Casey
[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 ...
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