Esteemed short story author, Peter Hillsman Taylor (1917-1994), was born in Trenton, Tenn., to a notable political family (he was grandson of Tennessee Governor and U. S. Senator Robert Love Bob Taylor). Taylor's father, Hillsman Taylor, a prominent attorney, moved the family to Memphis. 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 the poet Eleanor Ross of North Carolina. After the war, Taylor taught at The Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (now, 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. The collections were Happy Families Are All Alike (1959) and Miss Lenora When Last Seen (1963). The Collected Stories (1969) was followed by In the Miro District (1977), the title of which alludes to an early name for part of Middle Tennessee. In 1979 the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him its gold medal for literature. In 1986 he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985). His last collection of stories was The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court (1993), which deals with Tennessee families living in Washington, D.C., as members of his own family had done.

Taylor also wrote novels, which he tended to think of as extended short stories. They include A Woman of Means (1950), A Summons to Memphis (1986), and In the Tennessee Country (1994). He thought of the short story as a particularly dramatic form. In 1961 he was an associate of the Royal Court Theatre in London. His published plays are Tennessee Day in St. Louis (1956), A Stand in the Mountains (1971), and Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces (1973).

Taylor's career as a teacher of creative writing led him beyond Greensboro to Kenyon, Ohio State University, and finally the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, 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 2nd, 1994, and was buried in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Nancy Crampton is an art photographer living in New York City. She is particularly well known for her portraits of American authors, many of which were published in her book Writers (2005).