THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 4, 1994 TAG: 9411040724
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
Peter Taylor, a novelist and short-story writer whose work was often praised for its gentility and its emotional precision, died Wednesday at the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville. He was 77 and lived in Charlottesville.
He had suffered several strokes in October, said his son, Ross.
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 a period of 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,'' and commented that in the title story Taylor was ``at the very apex of his powers.'' ``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.''
It was Warren who also called Taylor one of the ``real, and probably enduring masters of the short story.''
The poet Richard Howard said that ``A Woman of Means'' was ``a novella worthy of Willa Cather.''
Taylor's latest novel, ``In the Tennessee Country,'' was reviewed in The Times on Wednesday by Margo Jefferson, who said that he ``regards his portion of the South very much as Edith Wharton regarded New York and Newport.''
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. by CNB