Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor

For other people named Peter Taylor, see .

Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor (January 8, 1917 – November 2, 1994) was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright.

He was born in Trenton, Tennessee to Matthew Hillsman "Red" Taylor, a prominent attorney who played football at Vanderbilt University in 1904 and 1905, and Katherine Baird (Taylor) Taylor. His father was named after Matthew Hillsman, a long-time local Baptist pastor. His father's father, Colonel Robert Zachery Taylor, had fought for the Confederate Army as a private under Nathan Bedford Forrest and had almost been killed by night riders near Reelfoot Lake in 1908. His mother's father was Robert Love Taylor, a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1907 until his death in 1912.

Taylor spent his early childhood in Nashville. The family moved to St. Louis in 1926 when Taylor's father, lawyer Matthew Hillsman Taylor, became president of the General American Life Insurance Company. In St. Louis, Taylor attended the Rossman School and St. Louis Country Day School. In 1932, the family moved to Memphis, where his father established a law practice. Taylor graduated from Central High School in Memphis in 1935. He wrote his first published piece while there, an interview with actress Katharine Cornell. After a gap year in which he traveled to England, Taylor enrolled at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis in 1936, studying under the critic Allen Tate. Tate encouraged Taylor to transfer to Vanderbilt University, which he later left to continue studying with the great American critic and poet John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, along with the poet Robert Lowell. He was also friends with Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, James Thackara, Robie Macauley and other significant literary figures of the time.