Works by
Peter Taylor
(Aka Peter Hillsman Taylor)
(Writer)
[January 8, 1917 - November 2, 1994]

Fiction

• In the Tennessee Country (1994)

• A Summons to Memphis (1986, 1999) -- Winner 1986 Pulitzer Prize and the 1986 Ritz Hemingway prize for English Literature.
  When Phillip Carver receives, on a lonely Sunday evening, two successive telephone calls from his sisters, begging him to leave his home in Manhattan and return immediately to Memphis, he is slow to agree. His sisters, middle-aged and unmarried, want his help in averting the remarriage of their father, an elderly widower. And although Phillip wants no part in such manipulations, he finds himself unable to refuse to make the trip South...and into his own past.

• A Woman of Means (1950, 1983, 1996)
  Gerald Dudley is an executive at a hardware company in St. Louis, living the quintessential bachelor life with his young son, Quint. He is also a man who aspires beyond his means and class. When Gerald meets the wealthy divorcée Ann Lauterbach and the two marry, life changes irrevocably for Quint. He enters a social world of private schools and debutante balls known to him only through his father's longings. As Quint's attachment to his stepmother and her "means" grows, her marriage to his father begins to crumble in small, subtle ways, which ultimately leads to larger, more devastating consequences.

Plays

• Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces (1973)
  "Two Images," "A Father and a Son," "Missing Person," "The Whistler," "Arson," "A Voice through the Door," and "The Sweethearts"

• A Stand in the Mountains (1965, 1985)
  A play in 7 scenes set at an imaginary resort in the Cumberland Mountains. The characters are wealthy and urban and come to the mountains from another world (5 men, 5 women).

• Tennessee Day in St. Louis (1959)

Short Stories

• The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court (1993)

• The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985) -- Winner 1986 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction

• In the Miro District and Other Stories (1977)

• The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (1969)

• Miss Leonora When Last Seen and Fifteen Other Stories (1963)

• Happy Families Are All Alike: A Collection of Stories (1959)

• The Widows of Thornton (1954, 1994)

• A Long Fourth and Other Stories (1948)

Other

• The Road and Other Modern Stories (1979), Peter Taylor, ed.

• Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965 (1967), Peter Taylor, Robert Lowell, and Robert Penn Warren, eds.

See also:

• Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life (2001) by Hubert Horton McAlexander

• Peter Taylor: A Descriptive Biography, 1934-87 (1989) by Stuart T. Wright