Peter Taylor: Complete Stories 1938-1959: The Library of America #298

For the first time, the complete stories of an American Chekhov, a master chronicler of tradition and transformation in the twentieth-century South

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, the 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. 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 with 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 first volume includes, in an appendix, six previously uncollected early efforts.) Several of these works-including Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time,
In the Miro District, and The Old Forest -are anthology classics. All are masterly contributions to the literature of the South and the art of the American short story.