He described his early childhood in an essay in the
Something about the Author Autobiography Series (
SAAS) as "one short happy adventure, knowing and caring little about what was going on in the outside world simply because there was so much going on in my inside world.... In terms of material wealth, we had very little, but there was a richness in the surroundings that money could never buy."
These rural southern roots would form the background for several of Taylor's books: for example, the Carolinas are used as the backdrop for his "Hatteras trilogy," a work of historical fiction that features the adventures of Wendy Appleton, a mute English girl found shipwrecked on an island off the coast of South Carolina in the late 1890s. The series includes Teetoncey, Teetoncey and Ben O'Neal, and The Odyssey of Ben O'Neal, all of which describe the growing romantic relationship between Wendy and her rescuer, a young man who is called "Teetoncey," or dunce, by his fellow villagers because of his desire to go to sea. "Statesville, in the heart of the Piedmont area of North Carolina, red-earth flatlands before the western rises of the Blue Ridges, had about five thousand inhabitants when I was born," recalled Taylor.
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