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 older, more strait-laced Nashvillean point of view, its
own “peculiar institutions … the institutions, that is to
say, which one associates with the cotton and river culture of
the Deep South,” as the narrator of his Pulitzer-Prize-winning
novel A Summons to Memphis explains. In the same book a
Nashville society lady puts it this way: “Nashville … is a
city of schools and churches, whereas Memphis is—well, Memphis is
something else again. Memphis is a place of steamboats and
cotton gins, of card playing and hotel society.”

Let me qualify my position as critic.