If, as Scott Fitzgerald once suggested, there are no second acts in American literature, the first one can be such a smash that the audience forgives the author's failure to stage acts two and three and a satisfactory denouement. A man who skyrockets to fame at the age of twenty - four, as did Fitzgerald when he published This Side of Paradise in 1920, hardly warrants condolences; besides, several impressive acts followed this one. At twenty - five, Norman Mailer bedazzled the critics and rang the cash registers with The Naked and the Dead, and three years later William Styron, a tender twenty - six, duplicated Mailer's success by winning 1951's Who - Will - Succeed - Faulkner Sweepstakes with Lie Down in Darkness. Once considered freakish, early fame today routinely descends upon young novelists whose first books sport dust covers dripping with the sort of encomia that could come honestly only from the novelist's mother. Who cares about second acts when you can gobble enough cake in the first one to last a lifetime?
There is another, less remarked type of success in American letters, one that starts off with little hoopla, builds slowly over decades with a gradually increasing audience, and then finally, in the writer's later years, brings recognition and acclaim. The recently deceased Bernard Malamud springs to mind, a novelist who failed to reel in the big one, but whose artistry and craftsmanship, devotedly cultivated for three decades, eared him an enduring spot among the leading novelists of mid - twentieth - century America. One thinks, too, of Eudora Welty, author of a string of sparkling books, who had to wait until her sixties to reap the sort of accolades that Mailer and Styron luxuriated in when they were half her age.
Peter Taylor is the latest writer to experience the mingling of happiness and wry amusement that must accompany the belated cheers of the literary masses. A fair index of his current popularity is the publication of The Old Forest and Other Stories by Ballantine (in a mass - market edition that, yes, boasts promotional blurbs worthy of maternal approbation), the 1986 reissue by Penguin Books of his Collected Stories of 1969, and the continuing paperback sales of In the Miro District, a collection first published in 1977. Since Ballantine, Penguin, and Carroll and Graff are not philanthropic institutions, one suspects that Taylor, at the age of sixty - nine (Ballantine's biographical squib gracious subtracts two years from his age), has suddenly become a hot property, able to command shelf space in the book emporiums that hawk their wares 'on the mall's second level, right between Frederick's of Hollywood and Famous French Paintings.
Taylor's devoted readers find this a bit nettling; they are gratified to see him reaching a wider audience, but they wonder why it took so long. They have known for decades that he is a writer of uncommon gifts and seldom surpassed achievement. Forty years ago, in an introduction to Taylor's first book, Robert Penn Warren, no mean judge of talent, hailed him as a writer of unusual promise, a promise that Taylor would transform into solid accomplishment in the years ahead. The literature professors knew who he was, for he had already begun to publish in the quarterlies Sewanee Review, Kenon Review, Shenandoah that they, but, alas, no one else reads. As something of a southern fried John Cheever, Taylor gained entree to the august pages of The New Yorker, but everybody knows that nobody (not even professors) reads the fiction that fills the spaces between advertisements, cartoons, and column enders in its pages. His Collected Stories garnered
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