Peter Taylor

For the first time, the complete stories of an American Chekhov, a master chronicler of tradition and transformation in the twentieth-century South

For the first time, the complete short stories of the master chronicler of tradition and transformation in the twentieth-century American South

Born and raised in Tennessee, Peter Taylor wasthe great chronicler of the American Upper South, capturing its gossipand secrets, its divided loyalties and morally complicatedlegacies in tales of pure-distilled brilliance. Now, for hiscentennial year, the Library of America and acclaimed shortstory writer Ann Beattie present an unprecedented two-volumeedition of Taylor's complete short fiction, all fifty-nine of thestories published in his lifetime in the order in which they werecomposed.

This first volume offers twenty-nine early masterpieces,including such classics as "A Spinster's Tale," "What YouHear from 'Em?," "Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time" and "MissLeonora When Last Seen." As a special feature, an appendix in the first volume gathers three stories Taylor published as an undergraduate that show the early emergence of hissingular style and sensibility.


"I think the real accomplishment of Peter Taylor may be to have conjured the great slow shapes of epic and tragedy, so they can be glimpsed in the little segment of an ordinary life, restoring to our myths their most unsettling implications."-Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead