Complete Stories 1938–1959: A Spinster’s Tale / What You Hear from ’Em? / Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time / Miss Leonora When Last Seen / Other Stories

Ann Beattie

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Firmly rooted in the Tennessee of his youth—a prewar world, as Robert Penn Warren once described it, “caught in a tangle of modern commercialism . . . and traditions gone to seed”—Peter Taylor’s stories transform the triumphs and tragedies of his mid-century Southerners into timeless, universal fiction in the manner of Chekhov or Henry James. Technically adept, witty, and psychologically subtle, they are, in the estimation of Joyce Carol Oates, “one of the major works of our literature.” Now, in his centennial year, Taylor joins fellow twentieth-century masters William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty in the Library of America with a two-volume edition of his complete short fiction.

This first volume includes twenty-nine stories written from 1938, when the author was twenty-one, to 1959, when he was forty-two, a period when Taylor wrote with special sensitivity about the domestic reverberations of social changes besetting the Upper South. As Ann Beattie observes in her introduction, “Taylor never flinches when presenting encounters between whites and blacks—whether affectionate, indifferent, or unkind—and dramatizes them forthrightly.” “Cookie” and “A Wife of Nashville” are among several stories concerning a white employer and a black servant, each by turn the other’s friend, protector, and exploiter. Other stories, such as the frequently anthologized “A Spinster’s Tale” and “The Fancy Woman,” are about women and the sometimes extreme measures they must take in order to negotiate a male-dominated world.

“Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” an unsettling Southern Gothic tale of a brother and sister that becomes an allegory of the perverse tenacity of class illusions, remains one of Taylor’s most celebrated works. Taylor considered it, along with “Miss Leonora When Last Seen,” a haunting meditation on the competing claims of history and community, to be among his finest stories. Also included in an appendix are three precocious undergraduate efforts that show the early emergence of Taylor’s singular style and sensibility.