In a career spanning over half a century, Peter Taylor explored in exquisite detail the dramas, large and small, of a Tennessee gentry struggling with the loss of the old certainties in an Old South becoming new. A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Penn/Faulkner Award and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, he was, in the estimation of Anne Tyler, othe undisputed master of the short-story form. You could give a creative writing class with no other text but his stories and that class would come out fully educated.o Now, for his centennial year, Taylor joins fellow twentieth-century masters William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and John Updike in the Library of America series an unprecedented two-volume edition of his complete short fiction. Edited by acclaimed writer Ann Beattie, it brings together for the first time all sixty of the stories that Taylor published during his professional career as writer, half of them restored to print for the first time in decades and five never before collected in book form. (This second volume, as a special feature, includes his remarks on accepting the Gold Medal in the Short Story from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters in 1978.) Several of these works-including oVenus, Cupid, Folly, and Time,o oIn the Miro District,o and oThe Old Foresto-are anthology classics. All are masterly contributions to the literature of the South and the art of the American short story.
