Henry Splawn Taylor was born in 1942 in Loudoun County, Virginia. His father, Thomas Edward Taylor, was a high school English teacher and dairy farmer who encouraged his son to recognize literary elements of poetry. Taylor’s mother, Mary Marshall (Splawn) Taylor, was an economist and the daughter of Dr. Walter M. W. Splawn, an economics professor, university president, and lawyer who served as the federal Interstate Commerce Commission chairman in the mid-1930’s. Taylor and his three sisters grew up near the Lincoln community on farmland owned by his paternal grandparents that had belonged to the Taylor family since the late eighteenth century. Taylor’s family and artistic neighbors shaped his appreciation for cultural activities. He attended public schools in Loudoun County for nine grades before enrolling in the George School, a Quaker boarding institution in Pennsylvania, by 1958. At that school, Taylor aspired to become a writer. He competed in track and equestrian sports.

In 1960, Taylor began studies at the University of Virginia. As an undergraduate, he served as editor of the literary magazine Plume and Sword, participated in the campus drama club the Virginia Players, and was mentored in poetry by Fred Bornhauser and George Garrett. His erratic academic performance resulted in him withdrawing from classes. He used his time off to write poetry that he published in New Writing from Virginia (1963), Shenandoah, The Sixties, Georgia Review, Encounter, and other publications. Taylor resumed course work, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1965. He secured a book contract from the Louisiana State University Press for his debut poetry collection, which was published as The Horse Show at Midnight in 1966. Taylor married Sarah Bean in June, 1965. That year, he enrolled in the graduate creative writing program at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, writing poems for that school’s literary magazine, Cargoes. Garrett anthologized Taylor’s short story, “And Bid a Fond Farewell to Tennessee,” written at Hollins, in The Girl in the Black Raincoat (1966). Annie Dillard and Lee Smith, who both became acclaimed writers, were students in writing seminars during the time Taylor was at Hollins. In 1966, Taylor received an M.A. in creative writing, writing his thesis “An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards,” which the University of Utah later published.

In 1966, Taylor began an impressive career as an academic and teacher of writing. Between 1966 and 1968, he served as an instructor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, a community near Hollins. He and James Dickey critiqued poems written by students at Hollins in spring, 1967. After his 1967 divorce, Taylor married Frances “Frannie” Ferguson Carney, a Hollins graduate, the next year. They had two sons, Thomas and Richard. From 1968 through 1971, Taylor was an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah, where he directed the University of Utah Writers’ Conference starting in 1969. He later edited a festschrift celebrating that conference’s founder, Brewster Ghiselin.

In June, 1970, Taylor participated in the Hollins Conference in Creative Writing and Cinema, where radio host John Graham interviewed him. The transcripts and biographical profile featuring Taylor were printed in Craft So Hard to Learn: Conversations with Poets and Novelists About the Teaching of Writing (1972) and The Writer’s Voice: Conversations with Contemporary Writers (1973), both edited by Garrett. Since 1970, he has served as a contributing editor for Hollins Critic , also writing articles for that journal. Taylor accepted a position in 1971 as associate professor of literature at American University in Washington, D.C., where he was promoted to professor in 1976. During 1978, he returned to Hollins as...