Some years before Peter Taylor's death in 1994, the tacit agreement was made that Hubert McAlexander would be the author's biographer. Peter Taylor, McAlexander's accomplished portrait, achieves for readers a remarkable intimacy with this central figure in the history of the American short story and one of the greatest southern writers of his time.

Taylor's life spanned most of the twentieth century, a fact borne out in the themes of social and psychic rifts in a modernizing South that dominate his stories, plays, and novels. McAlexander knits together the facts and fiction of...

In 1982, sisters Ruth Finley and Margaret Finley Shackelford made wills bequeathing 2,500 acres and two antebellum houses in Marshall County, Mississippi, to the National Audubon Society. Early in 1998, the surviving sister Margaret Shackelford invited the society to open its state headquarters at the family home in Holly Springs and to begin working at Strawberry Plains, the plantation where she lived four miles north of town. At her death late that year, the society took full possession of the sisters' bequest, and Strawberry Plains Audubon Center was established. Strawberry Plains...