During the last fifteen years of his life--capping a fifty-seven-year publishing career--Peter Taylor was awarded the Gold Medal for the short story from the American Institute of Arts and Letters (1978), a National Endowment for the Arts senior fellowship (1984), a PEN/Faulkner Award for The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985), a PEN/Malamud Award (1992), and an American Book Award nomination (1986), a Ritz-Hemingway Prize (1986), and a Pulitzer Prize (1987) for A Summons to Memphis (1986). His fiction frequently earned favorable comparisons with the work of Anthony Trollope, Henry James, and Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Yet, when he died at age seventy-seven on 2 November 1994, the designation he had given himself years before--"the best-known unknown writer in America"--was probably still as true as ever. Like many other writers of the Southern Renaissance, Taylor often found that his regional subject matter was misunderstood as local-color nostalgia or a cultural anachronism.

Novelists are usually better...