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 was the great chronicler of
the American Upper South, capturing its gossip and secrets, its divided
loyalties and morally complicated legacies in tales of pure-distilled
brilliance. Now, for his centennial year, the Library of America and
acclaimed short story writer Ann Beattie present an unprecedented
two-volume edition of Taylor's complete short fiction, all fifty-nine of
the stories published in his lifetime in the order in which they were
composed.
This first volume offers twenty-nine early masterpieces, including such
classics as "A Spinster's Tale," "What You Hear from 'Em?," "Venus,
Cupid, Folly and Time" and "Miss Leonora 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 his
singular 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