Benjamin Taylor is 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 (published in 2017); 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. His travel memoir, Naples Declared, appeared in the spring of 2011.
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.
