Authors in History

Peter Taylor was born on January 8, 1917, in the small community of Trenton, Tennessee. The Taylor family moved several times during Peter’s childhood. While he was still a teenager, his family moved first to Nashville, Tennessee, then to St. Louis, Missouri, finally stopping in Memphis in 1936. Hit hard by the Great Depression, Peter’s father, who was a lawyer, had to move where he could find work. Taylor enrolled in Southwestern (Rhodes College) in 1936 and began studying under Allen Tate. On a suggestion from Tate, he transferred to Vanderbilt the following year to study writing under John Crowe Ransom. When Ransom left to teach at Kenyon College in Ohio, Peter Taylor decided to follow him. There he found kindred spirits in fellow writers Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. Just before the beginning of WWII, Taylor and Lowell moved to Louisiana State to continue studying English under Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Taylor grew up in a political and literary environment in the celebrated Tennessee governor’s race of 1886 dubbed the “War of the Roses”. Taylor’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and grand-uncle all vied for the top spot. His grandfather, Robert Love Taylor, who won the governorship that year, was also a writer, as is his third-cousin, Robert. Both Peter and Robert Taylor have written about their famous family, the first in In the Tennessee Country and the second in Fiddle and Bow.

In 1940, Peter Taylor was drafted into the army, where he served for five years. Before he was to be stationed in England in 1943, he married the poet Eleanor Ross, who is still publishing, her last work of poetry, Late Leisure, appearing in 1999. Upon his return to the states, Taylor began teaching at universities all over the country: the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Kenyon College, Ohio State, Harvard, and the University of Virginia. He lived and taught in Charlottesville from 1967 until his death in 1994.

Throughout his distinguished career, Taylor received numerous fellowships, grants and awards for his literary works. In 1950 he was given a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the following year received a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant. Almost twenty years later, in 1979, Taylor won the gold medal for literature from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Some of his most famous accomplishments include both the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. In 1987, Taylor received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Songwriter Beth Slater Whitson was born in Goodrich, Hickman County, Tennessee, on December 1, 1879. Her parents were John H. Whitson and Anna Slater Whitson; her father was coeditor of the Hickman Pioneer newspaper. Beth Whitson began her extensive songwriting career in Hickman County. With the assistance of her younger sister Alice Whitson Norton, she composed lyrics to over four hundred songs and wrote poems and short stories, many of which were published in leading magazines of the early twentieth century. Her first major hit was “Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland” in 1909; it was followed the next year by “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” which is still performed today.

In 1913 Whitson and her family moved to Nashville where she and sister Alice continued to write and publish. Beth’s local biographer, Grace Baxter Thompson, remarked at the dedication of a state historical marker to Whitson’s career in 1978: “She gave beauty and color and enjoyment to her community from which those qualities have been far-reaching and long-lasting”

Beth was not only a prolific song writer, but also a gifted poet and a writer of wonderful short stories. One of those stories, “The Knitter Of Liege” was named as a National top fifty short story for the year 1916. Not to be outdone, Beth’s little sister Alice, also became widely known as a writer of prose and short stories. She also wrote several books. Most were children’s topics, but some had more adult tones. One was even on how to write and how and where to market one’s writings.

At left is a picture taken from a watercolor portrait of Beth Slater Whitson. The portrait was painted by Dr. I. B. Beale in 1989 and was given to benefit “Fairview Academy Project” which was a non-profit group dedicated to renovating a former private school of the same name in Centerville into a center for cultural activity for Hickman County, Tennessee. The project ran aground for lack of suitable funds, and the Hickman County Historical Society now has possession of this portrait. Click on the portrait itself for a better view of it and the painter as well.

Beth Slater Whitson died on April 26, 1930, and is buried at Spring Hill Cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee. Her sister Alice Whitson Norton is buried nearby. She was born on August 31, 1885 and died on February 4, 1961.

Williams’ writing career began in 1948, when she won the Mademoiselle college fiction contest her junior year at Bard College. The story she submitted, “Rain Later,” also garnered an honorable mention in the 1949 edition of Best American Short Stories.

Following that triumph, Williams decided to intensify her energies on writing. Shortly after reading The Sound and the Fury, she paid an impromptu visit to William Faulkner’s home. Once the two met, they embarked on an enduring friendship, as well as a five-year relationship. The pair exchanged hundreds of letters, most of which focused on their writing, not romance.

While corresponding with Faulkner, Williams’ writing flourished, and her story “The Morning and the Evening” ran in the Atlantic Monthly. After her romance with Faulkner died, Williams married writer Ezra Drinker Bowen and continued writing. Four years after “The Morning and Evening,” she published a sequel in Mademoiselle.

The stories fused together to form Williams’ first novel, The Morning and the Evening, which earned the John P. Marquand First Novel Award. Following the release of this book, William Styron labeled her a “greatly gifted writer,” and Robert Penn Warren contributed a blurb for the book’s jacket. Other notable writers, such as Doris Betts and Joyce Carol Oates showered Williams with praise after the publication of her second book, Old Powder Man, which focused on a fictionalized version of her father, a dynamite broker.

Despite mostly growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Williams based her stories in rural Mississippi, where she drew from her childhood summers in Tate County, and morphed local gossip into literary masterpieces. She eventually abandoned the South for work on the East Coast, but said she would never base a novel there, “not because there’s nothing to write about. It’s just the Southern flavor that—just simply moves me.”

Williams revisited her famed affair in the novel The Wintering, which fictionalized the “poignant and unusual story of the love between a world-famous writer and a young woman who comes to pay homage to him,” as the book jacket details. The novel was a finalist for the National Book award and was recognized with a grant from the Institute of Arts and Letters in 1962.

In 1984, after divorcing both Bowen and her second husband, John Fargason, Williams reconnected with Seymour Lawrence, who first published her story in the Atlantic Monthly. The pair stayed together until Lawrence’s death in 1994, and Williams found that after “five years of loneliness, pain and hurt, it was wonderful again to have someone who needed me, someone to cook for, to have at home after that long, terrible time of opening the door in late afternoon, closing it, and going inside to the silence of four walls and knowing no one was ever going to come.”

For the next decade, two of Williams’ novels were reissued as part of Louisiana State University Press Voice of the South series, and she published more novellas and short stories. She passed away on April 11th, 2004, at the age of 75. Her life is rarely examined, except in the 2006 memoir William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers, which relayed her impressions of Faulkner but paid few dues to Williams’ own work.

Anne Goodwin Winslow was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She had little formal schooling, but produced novels, poetry, short stories, and non-fiction.