Special Collections

Finding Aid for the Peter H. Taylor Collection
(MUM00442)

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Finding Aid for the Peter H. Taylor Collection

Administrative Information

Acquisition Information

Received from Hubert H. McAlexander, 2005

Processing Information

Collection processed by Audrey M. Uffner, April 2009. Finding aid encoded by Kathryn
Michaelis, January 2012.

Additions

No further additions are expected to this collection.

Subject Terms

Formats

Biographical Note

Peter H. Taylor was born in Trenton, Tennessee, on January 8, 1917. He attended Southwestern
University and Vanderbilt University. He entered Kenyon College in 1938 to study under
John Crowe Ransom, graduating in 1940. After briefly enrolling in the Louisiana State
University for graduate work under Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, he entered
the U.S. Army in 1941. He served stateside at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and overseas
at Tidworth Camp in England before being discharged from the Army in 1945.

Taylor married poet Eleanor Ross in 1943. The couple’s first child Katherine Baird
Taylor was born in 1948, and their son, Peter Ross Taylor, was born in 1955.

Beginning his teaching career at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro in 1946, he served a year as assistant professor at Indiana University
in 1948 before returning to Greensboro in 1949. In 1952, he taught at the University
of Chicago in the spring and began an associate professorship at Kenyon College in
the fall. In 1957 he also served as an associate professor at the Ohio State University,
and in 1963, he rejoined the University of North Carolina. In 1964 and 1968, he served
as a visiting professor at Harvard in the fall semesters. He became a Professor of
English at the University of Virginia in 1967 and retired from the university in 1983.

His book publications include: A Long Fourth (1948); A Woman of Means (1950); The Widows of Thornton (1954); Happy Families Are All Alike (1959); Miss Leonora When Last Seen (1964); Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965 (co-editor 1967); A Stand in the Mountains (1968); Collected Stories (1969); Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces (1973); In the Miro District (1977); The Old Forest (1985); and A Summons to Memphis (1986).

Taylor received the Pulitzer Prize for A Summons to Memphis (1987) as well as the
O. Henry first prize (1959), Gold Medal for Literature of the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters (1978), a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Humanities (1984), the PEN/Faulkner Award (1986) and the Ritz Hemingway Prize
for fiction (1987). Over the course of his career he also received a Guggenheim Fellowship
(1950-1) a Fulbright grant, Ford Foundation Fellowship at London’s Royal Court Theatre
(1960-1), and a Rockefeller Foundation grant (1966).

Scope and Content Note

The Peter H. Taylor Collection is a gift from Hubert H. McAlexander, who authored
a book on Taylor’s life. The collection closely mirrors the format of the book, but
also includes material that McAlexander chose to cut from the final project. Materials
found in the collection include personal correspondence between McAlexander and Eleanor
Ross Taylor and personal friends of Taylor, research notes and photocopied materials
from various holdings of Peter Taylor material, and newspaper clippings/reviews concerning
Peter Taylor’s life and work. Also included are photographs and oral histories on
cassette tapes.

User Information

Preferred Citation

Peter H. Taylor Collection, Archives and Special Collections, J.D. Williams Library,
The
University of Mississippi

Access Restrictions

The Peter H. Taylor Collection is open for research. The audiovisual portion of this collection is stored at an off-site facility. Researchers
interested in using this part of the collection must contact Archives and Special Collections at least two business days in
advance of their planned visit.

Copyright Restrictions

The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the
making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under
certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized
to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions
is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other
than private study, scholarship or research.” If a user makes a request for,
or
later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use,”
that user may be liable for copyright infringement.

Related Material

Resources at the University of Mississippi

McAlexander, Hubert H., Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001

Separated Material

The following items have been removed from the collection and cataloged:

Books:

Bishop, John Peale et al, eds. The Fugitives, The Agrarians and Other Twentieth Century Southern Writers. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1985.

Casey, John. Spartina. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Casey, John. Testimony and Demeanor. New York: Shoreline Books, 1979.

Griffith, Albert J. Peter Taylor. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Netherton, John., ed. Tennessee: A Homecoming. Third National Corporation, 1985.

Robison, James Curry. Peter Taylor: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

Taylor, Eleanor Ross. Days Going Days Coming Back. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991.

Taylor, Eleanor Ross. New and Selected Poems. Stuart Wright, 1983.

Taylor, Eleanor Ross. Welcome Eumenides. New York: George Braziller, 1972.

Williamson, Alan. Eloquence and Mere Life: Essays on the Art of Poetry. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Wright, Stuart. Peter Taylor: A Descriptive Biography, 1934-1987. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.

Journals:

The Chattahoochee Review, Fall 1985 and Fall 2000

The Greensboro Review, Summer 1992, No. 52

Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 9, Autumn 1987

The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. XII, No. 3

Key West Review, Fall 1988

New Virginia Review, Vol. 9, Number 2

Shenandoah, Winter 1977 (2 copies)

The Southern Quarterly, Winter 2000

The Southwestern Journal, 1939

Arrangement

This collection is arranged roughly in the order in which it was received, which reflects
the structure of Hubert H. McAlexander’s Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life.

Container List