Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 4, 1994 TAG: 9411040132
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Medium
He had suffered several strokes in October, said his son, Ross.
For many years he headed the creative-writing program at the University of Virginia.
Taylor, who won a Pulitzer Prize and the Ritz/Hemingway Prize in 1986 for his novel ``A Summons to Memphis,'' was best known for his shorter works of fiction, novellas as well as short stories. As the author once said, ``Compression is everything.''
His work, created over 50 years, brought him many awards and honors and recognition as a writer unswervingly in a classic Southern tradition.
In his art, he always remained close to his roots. Reviewing ``The Old Forest,'' a collection of stories, in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Tower characterized the author's voice as ``civilized and affecting.'' ``The Old Forest'' won the PEN/Faulkner award as the best work of fiction in 1985.
Reviewing Taylor's short novel ``A Woman of Means'' in 1950, Robert Penn Warren said that despite the book's brevity, ``there is such a vividness of characterization and such a sense of the depth and complication of event that the effect is one of a full-bodied narrative.''
Warren also called Taylor one of the ``real, and probably enduring masters of the short story.''
His territory was not the Deep South, but Nashville, Memphis and the fictional town of Chatham, Tenn.
He was born in Trenton, Tenn., on Jan. 8, 1917, into a family with a political history. His grandfather Robert L. Taylor had been both a U.S. senator and the governor of Tennessee.
Unwilling to become a lawyer like his father, Taylor studied literature and creative writing at Vanderbilt University, where he came under the tutelage of the poet John Crowe Ransom.
At first, he wrote poetry; then he turned to fiction, while retaining his lyrical nature. Ransom proved to be a lifelong influence, as were Warren, Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks, among other celebrated Southern writers.
When Ransom moved to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, Taylor transferred there. In 1940, while doing graduate work at Louisiana State University, he published stories in The Southern Review, and followed that with stories in a variety of other small magazines, including the Partisan, Kenyon and Sewanee reviews.
Both at Kenyon and Louisiana State, Robert Lowell was one of Taylor's fellow students, and they became close friends. Later Taylor's work was printed in The New Yorker, with which he was to be identified throughout his life. His fiction never had the widest readership, but his loyal admirers sought out and savored his tales of upper-class citizens in an old and changing South.
In 1984, he was one of four writers to receive $25,000 senior fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, given to recognize individuals who had made an extraordinary contribution to American literature.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor; a daughter, Katherine Baird; and a granddaughter.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.