Taylor, Robert Lewis

Robert Lewis Taylor, born in Carbondale, Illinois on September 24, 1912, grew up attending local public schools and enrolled for one year at Southern Illinois University, where he did his first professional writing. After his graduation in 1933 he was hired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and worked for the newspaper during the next three years. In 1939 he was hired by the New Yorker as a "Profile" writer as well as being published in the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest. In 1942 Taylor enlisted in the Navy, and he served until 1946, while continuing to write for the New Yorker from notes sent to him. He wrote, in addition to short stories and magazine articles, a novel about six survivors of a world catastrophe, Adrift in a Boneyard, which received mixed reviews. Numerous other books and articles followed, his most successful one being The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, published in 1958 by Doubleday, which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and was purchased for a film by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He died in 1998.