Word: mr
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tales Mr. Taylor contrasts other times-family backgrounds, former family relations and gatherings, former friendships, the old-time "atmosphere of a prosperous and civilized existence"-with each character's experience and evaluation of the present...
...Mr. Taylor's central characters perform their own self-analysis. Each is tremendously curious and thoughtful about what and why something is happening to him and why he reacts as he does. The reader experiences with him every nervous blush, sweat, grope, and moment of insight...
Than many people in the society of which Mr. Taylor writes. His stories are set in an upper-middle-class Southern world with grand pretensions-debuts, lots of servants, and best families. The proprieties of this world require that many things be hidden. People are driven to deviant behavior. Mr. Taylor's stories are shadowed by drunkards, bastardly men, spinsters, estranged wives who are dependent on their servants as their only friends, only family, only life. In almost every story a servant holds the family together. The servant presides over the rituals and amenities which bolster status, esteem, sanity-like...
BESIDES the perceptive narrators who are able to maturely integrate their lives, Mr. Taylor describes those top-drawer people who grow into unhappy insurance men and car dealers. They are often incapable of a generous and rich relationship with a partner, with children, with-simply-any other human being. Mr. Taylor suggests that the family can effectively balance the fear and uncertainty of life. Yet this kind of security is not automatic. The man in "At the Drugstore" can say that he and his father "had . . . made these adjustments and concessions that a happy and successful life requires. . . . They...
...Mr. Taylor keeps returning and returning to the past and to border-state Tennessee as it was, to examine its images and realities. What people think, the complexion of their blushes and disfigurations, the houses they decorate-these are the things Mr. Taylor's stories are about. Included in the complex stories is a subtle description of black-white relations in the thirties, forties, and fifties: as in the narration of a "fancy woman's" concern for what the kitchen help think of her when she visits a rich gentleman's house for a week. Or "A Wife of Nashville...