Volume 2, Number 9 · June 11, 1964
The Stories of Peter Taylor
By John Thompson
Miss Leonora When Last Seem
by Peter Taylor
Obolensky, 398 pp., $4.95
Middle class, Middle West, 'the great heartland'—many writers have been born into it but few write about it. In American literature, the middleclass Middle West is very nearly defined as that which one has fled. (Today the emigration may be internal, to one of the regional universities. But that is far enough.) The idea of the Middle West, therefore, remains as central in the literary imagination as the fact of it does for our nation, and as undescribed, too; as unexamined; as unchallenged. We think we know it from our childhood, perhaps, or from our continual exposure to the advertised images of it. Yet we seem to know, also, that even before these images made their travesty, the life itself was a betrayal of some other American style. The only certainty is that there must be more to know. The history is unwritten and no commanding literary works have come forth to succeed the antique visions of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson.
Review, 2700 words
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