Skip to main content

Stephen Taylor, 80

Fri, 05/31/2019 - 15:13

Stephen Taylor of Springs, who had a long and varied career in computer technology, writing, film criticism, and academia, died on April 26 at the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Southampton. He was 80 years old. Death was attributed to cardiopulmonary arrest.

The New York Times in 1988 profiled Mr. Taylor after he wrote the nonfiction book “Building Thoreau’s Cabin,” also titled “A Place of Your Own Making,” following his quest to build a writing studio on his property by himself. The Times observed that he “put some invention and ingenuity into play.”

“It’s actually a book about personal competence, about seeing what you can accomplish by doing it yourself and learning as you do,” Mr. Taylor told the interviewer.

His fiction and film criticism ap­peared in The Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, Transatlantic Review, The Village Voice, and more. His plays were produced Off Broadway and regionally, including at the Yale Repertory Theater, the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and the Pasadena Playhouse. He also contributed to East End-theme publications such as “Springs: A Celebration.”

Mr. Taylor was a computer software consultant and systems analyst as well, first with the Sylvania Electric Company and then at the Corporation for Economic and Industrial Research. He was part of the team that worked on the ballistic missile early warning system, according to his family. 

In his academic career, Mr. Taylor taught both film history and an introductory computer class at the Cooper Union in Manhattan.

Mr. Taylor was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 15, 1938, to Robert Taylor, formerly Morris Cohen, and Mollie Plotkin. He grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Erasmus High School in 1955, one year earlier than scheduled. He attended Columbia University and New York University before transferring to Brooklyn College, and graduated with honors in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in math.

Over the years he also lived in Cambridge, Mass., but he met his wife, Barbara Hulsart, in East Hampton. The two were married in Springs in July 1983; Dr. Hulsart survives. Mr. Taylor is also survived by two sons, Sam Taylor and Matt Taylor, both of Brooklyn.

He was cremated. A private memorial was held at the family home in Springs on May 4. Memorial donations have been suggested to the East Hampton Library, 159 Main Street, East Hampton 11937.

Sept. 15, 1938 - April 26, 2019

Villages

Owl's Death Prompts Call for Bird-Friendly Building

Window strikes kill up to a billion birds annually and rank up there with cats and habitat destruction as the leading causes of recent steep declines. After the recent death of a much-watched Eurasian eagle-owl that was set loose from the Central Park Zoo, a bill calling for bird-friendly building measures has been revived in the New York Assembly and Senate.

Mar 28, 2024

Architect’s Descendants Visit East Hampton Gem

Michele L’Hommedieu Hofmann had no idea until retiring last fall and starting to research her family history how prominent a role her great-great-grandfather James H. L’Hommedieu had played in Long Island’s late-19th-century architecture. On a trip to New York that included a stop at an East Hampton house he designed for Robert Southgate Bowne, a founder of the Maidstone Club and first president of the Long Island Rail Road, she and her family got a crash course in L’Hommedieu’s work.

Mar 28, 2024

Item of the Week: Gardiner Family Gossip From 1889

On July 16, 1889, while staying in Lenox, Mass., Sarah Diodati Gardiner Thompson wrote to her daughter Sarah Thompson Gardiner, who was vacationing at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Family news was top of mind.

Mar 28, 2024

Your support for The East Hampton Star helps us deliver the news, arts, and community information you need. Whether you are an online subscriber, get the paper in the mail, delivered to your door in Manhattan, or are just passing through, every reader counts. We value you for being part of The Star family.

Your subscription to The Star does more than get you great arts, news, sports, and outdoors stories. It makes everything we do possible.