Peter Taylor secured a national following through his long relationship with the New Yorker and his widely read volumes from the 1980s, The Old Forest and Other Stories and A Summons to Memphis. The Pulitzer Prize- and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author's portrayals of the battles of strong-willed fathers and mothers with their equally strong-willed sons lie at the center of his acclaimed fiction.

David Robinson presents Taylor as a writer deeply concerned with the interworkings of family relationships. He argues that Taylor's key theme is the contest of the individual for maturity and balance within the nurturing but confining ties of the family. This struggle, costly in emotional terms, is often thwarted or incomplete.

David Robinson offers an important critical assessment of the work of one of the South's greatest writers. It includes the first extensive critical discussion of Taylor's last two works, The Oracle of Stoneleigh Court (1993) and In the Tennessee Country (1994), which Robinson places in the context of Taylor's full career.