Taylor, Robert Lewis

Taylor, Robert Lewis (1912–), Illinois‐born novelist and journalist, wrote profiles for The New Yorker (1939–48) collected in Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief (1948) and The Running Pianist (1950). He also wrote W.C. Fields, His Follies and Fortunes (1949), Winston Churchill (1952), and Vessel of Wrath (1966), a life of Carry Nation. His fiction includes the satirical novels Adrift in a Boneyard (1947), Professor Fodorski (1950), and The Bright Sands (1954). The Travels of Jamie McPheeters (1958, Pulitzer Prize) is a rollicking picaresque tale of a teenage boy and his father en route from Louisville to California in 1849 and of life in the gold rush. A Journey to Matecumbe (1961) is another picaresque tale, about a boy and his uncle fleeing the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction; Two Roads to Guadalupé (1964) is still another lusty adventure story, about a teenage boy and his older brother in the Mexican War; A Roaring in the Wind (1978) is about an expelled Harvard student of the mid‐19th century who tells of his adventures in a lusty Montana town; and Niagara (1980) is a rambunctious tale of life in the upstate New York resort town.