Peter Taylor was born in Trenton, Tennessee, in 1917 and graduated from Central High School in Memphis. He studied at Southwestern at Memphis, Vanderbilt University and Kenyon College, where John Crowe Ransom taught him. He later taught at Kenyon and at the University of Virginia.
He is known above all for his stories of the urban South, collected in volumes such as The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985). A Summons to Memphis (1986) won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1994.