Fathers

We create our world from imagination and memory, both personal memory and history, which is our collective memory. In Fathers Richard Taylor pursues his progenitors, gleaning what he can from history and memory to imagine their lives and how their lives have informed his own. Drawn to history in childhood by his enigmatic father and his Uncle Louis—both delightful characters—Taylor searches for his forefather Taylors, who fought in the Revolutionary War and on both sides in the Civil War. With warm humor and precise language he allows us into his extended family and describes his struggles as he eschews lawyering to become a teacher and writer. Fathers is filled with a contagious generosity, a sweet humility and finally great gratitude.

True to his title there are many fathers (along with a few prominent women) celebrated here, foremost his own father Joe Howard "Buzz" Taylor, as well as ancestors like Reuben Taylor, first of his Kentucky line, surrogate fathers including his Uncle Louis and best friend David Orr, and his son, now a father himself, continuing the generational saga. But recalling that the child is father of the man, the chief reason to welcome this book is for the insights it affords into Taylor's early life story, including nostalgic accounts of his childhood in and around Louisville, Kentucky, vivid portraits of the people who shaped his development, and his reckoning with the fraught history of the Civil War and his legacy as a southerner. Taylor says this may be as close to an autobiography as he is apt to write, which is all the more reason to cherish these sketches from the life of a true Kentucky literary treasure.

Richard Taylor's memoir speaks in two voices, one voice of the active participant in his early years; the other voice belongs to the historian as he gives the account of his ancestors' lives. He brings us the immediacy of the past. The reader can stroke the fur, wade the river, much like Proust.