Author Peter Hillsman Taylor (1917-1994) was born in Trenton, Tennessee. Taylor was educated at Southwestern at Memphis, Vanderbilt, and Kenyon College (where he studied with John Crowe Ransom). He also did graduate work at Louisiana State University, which had become a center of literary creativity through teachers Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. During World War II he served in the U. S. Army in England. In 1943 he married poet Eleanor Ross of North Carolina. After the war, Taylor taught at The Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (later the University of North Carolina at Greensboro).

His first book, A Long Fourth and Other Stories, was published in 1948 with an introduction by Robert Penn Warren. His earliest stories were published in the Kenyon, Sewanee, Southern, and Virginia Quarterly Reviews. Then he began to publish regularly in The New Yorker.

By the early 1960s he had achieved a national reputation in the short story form having published several collections. In 1979, the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Taylor its gold medal for literature. In 1986 he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985). In addition to short stories, Taylor also authored novels and plays.

Taylor's career as a teacher of creative writing led him beyond Greensboro to Kenyon, Ohio State University, and finally the University of Virginia which he made his home in the last years of his life. In the late 1960s, he taught briefly at Harvard but turned down a permanent position there because he feared the public would view him primarily as a teacher rather than a writer. Nevertheless he headed the creative writing program at Virginia until his retirement. In 1984 he received a $25,000 senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to American literature. Taylor died on November 2, 1994, and is buried in Sewanee, Tennessee.