A summons to Memphis - Hardcover

TAYLOR, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701131993 ISBN 13: 9780701131999

Publisher: Chatto and Windus, 1987

Synopsis

Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
"American readers demand novels, and now Peter Taylor has given them one; to say that it is every bit as good as the best of his short stories is the highest compliment it can be paid."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
When Phillip Carver receives, on a lonely Sunday evening, two successive telephone calls from his sisters, begging him to leave his home in Manhattan and return immediately to Memphis, he is slow to agree. His sisters, middle-aged and unmarried, want his help in averting the remarriage of their father, an elderly widower. And although Phillip wants no part in such manipulations, he finds himself unable to refuse to make the trip South...and into his own past.

About this title

Review:

Peter Taylor is well-known as a masterful writer of short stories set in the old South; not the well-explored South of explosive passions, but an urban world of faded gentility and empty custom. In his almost Jamesian evocations of the mannered upper classes in his native Tennessee, he neither romanticizes nor reviles, but meticulously observes, revealing the patterns of social behavior that leave the individual at the mercy of a relentless past. In this, only the second novel of his long career and the winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Taylor weaves a rich social web in telling the story of one family's stark social decline, symbolized by a move from Nashville to Memphis, and of the consequences through the years and down the generations.

About the Author:

Peter Taylor was born in Tennessee in 1917. He was the author of seven books of stories, including The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, A Long Fourth, In the Miro District and Other Stories and The Old Forest and Other Stories (which won the Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction in 1985); three novels including A Summons to Memphis (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1987); and three books of plays. Mr. Taylor taught at Harvard University, the University of North Carolina, and Kenyon College, from which he graduated in 1940. Before his death in 1994, he was Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto and Windus
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0701131993
• ISBN 13: 9780701131999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224