Robert Lewis Taylor

Who was Robert Lewis Taylor?

Robert Lewis Taylor was an American author and winner of the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Born in Carbondale, Illinois, Taylor attended Southern Illinois University for one year. The university now houses his papers. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor of Arts in 1933. After college, he became a journalist and won awards for reporting. In 1939, he became a writer for The New Yorker magazine, contributing biographical sketches. His work also appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest.

From 1942 to 1946, Taylor served in the United States Navy during World War II. During his service, he wrote numerous stories and Adrift in a Boneyard, an extended fiction about survivors of a disaster. In 1949 The Saturday Evening Post commissioned a series of biographical sketches of W. C. Fields. He published them together as W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes. Taylor continued to write biographies, including one of Winston Churchill, as well as fiction.