2019 Hall of Fame Inductee
Shakespearean scholar.
His activities at Topeka High demonstrated that Gary Taylor’s future lay with “words”: Debate, Pres. NFL at THS, Chief Justice of THS Judicial Council, Model UN, Quill & Scroll, World staff, World editor, and All Time Honor-T. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English Classics at KU, but for his doctorate traveled across “the Pond” to Cambridge University (1988). While in England, Taylor was a joint general editor of The Oxford Shakespeare. During this period he rediscovered a long lost work attributed to Shakespeare that earned the former Trojan international notoriety including a front page story in the New York Times. Dr. Taylor has written numerous books and articles, both scholarly and for the layman, about Elizabethan literature, as well as taught at Oxford, Brandeis University, and the University of Alabama. Presently he is the Dahl and Lottie Pryor Professor of Shakespeare Literature at Florida State University.