The territory Peter Taylor staked out for himself may be summed up easily and neatly enough. His characters are primarily upper-middle-class and upper-class people from the upper, as opposed to the “deep,” south, living in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Just as William Faulkner made the state of Mississippi his theater of conflict and revelation, Peter Taylor focused on Tennessee, with its three distinct regions: west, middle, and east. Taylor had roots in all three provinces and in his writings the state becomes a paysage moralisé.

Born in 1917 in the small West Tennessee town of Trenton—fictionalized as Thornton—he spent his childhood there and in Nashville, the urban center of Middle Tennessee, which was the first part of the state to be settled. He moved with his family first to St. Louis, and then to Memphis when he was fifteen years old. West Tennessee, centered around Memphis, had from the o ...

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