Peter Taylor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award, is virtually unknown today. In a 1985 review, the New York Times said: “His narrative method is to hover over the action, to digress from it, to explore byways and relationships, to speculate on alternative possibilities – in short, to defy the conventions of brevity and concentration that we usually associate with the genre. What results is often a thickly populated microcosm of an entire society, with its assumptions, virtues, loyalties and snobberies revealed.” I find this approach appealing and intriguing, which is why he’s among my favorite short story writers.
Peter Taylor, The Old Forest and Other Stories (Garden City, NY: The Dial Press, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1985), p. 80.