In a career spanning over half a century, Peter Taylor explored in exquisite detail the dramas, large and small, of a Tennessee gentry struggling with the loss of the old certainties in an Old South becoming new. A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Penn/Faulkner Award and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, he was, in the estimation of Anne Tyler, 'the undisputed master of the short-story form. You could give a creative writing class with no other text but his stories and that class would come out fully educated.'