Benjamin Taylor is the author of Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather; Here We Are: A Memoir; a memoir of boyhood, The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered; and the book-length essay, Into the Open.
His is also the author of the novel The Book of Getting Even, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award Finalist, Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year, and Ferro-Grumley Prize Finalist. His novel Tales Out of School, winner of the 1996 Harold Ribalow Prize, was reissued in 2008.
In the autumn of 2010, Penguin published The Letters of Saul Bellow, edited by Taylor while he was in residence at MacDowell in 2009. His travel memoir, Naples Declared, appeared in the spring of 2011 – he wrote a chapter of this book during the same residency.
While at MacDowell in 2024, he worked on his novel The Cloud of Knowing, which tells the story of the widow of an esteemed American composer. She has fended off would-be biographers of her husband for decades, but is persuaded to entrust the task to a recent applicant. Consequences follow.
