Warren Taylor was born in Bedford County, Tennessee on July 2, 1903. He received the B.A. degree in 1924 and the M.A. degree in 1926 from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. From 1924 to 1925, he taught at Nashville's Jordonia High School. He served as Instructor at the University of Tennessee from 1926 to 1929 and in 1930 moved to the University of Chicago to undertake graduate work in English literature. He interrupted his studies to come to Oberlin College as Instructor in the English Department, then and now the largest humanities department in the College of Arts and Sciences. Taylor's colleagues in 1930 included professors Wager, Sherman, Mack, Jelliffe, Taft, McLaughlin, Lampson, Bongiorno, Diekhoff, Shaver, Singleton, and Williams. In 1934, Taylor took an academic leave of absence in order to complete the Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago. His thesis, Tudor Figures of Rhetoric, was published by the University of Chicago in 1937, the year Taylor returned to Oberlin to resume the post of Instructor. He reached the rank of Assistant Professor in 1941, Associate Professor in 1947, and Professor of English in 1950. From 1958 to 1961, he served as Chairman of the English Department. His lectures on Shakespeare and American literature marked the intellectual high points of many undergraduate careers, and several of his students sought advanced degrees in literature. Taylor retired in 1970 but continued to teach until 1974 as Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Hiram College.

During his thirty-four-year teaching career, Taylor promoted the value of an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum in educating the "whole person." He traced his approach to the educational philosophy of President Henry Churchill King (1858-1934), which celebrated what King termed the "primacy of the person." In 1946, Taylor convened a committee of the College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Division to plan an interdisciplinary course in the humanities. The resulting course, "The Humanistic Tradition," was offered for the first time in 1946. Lectures, given by Oberlin faculty and visiting scholars, aimed at a comparative and synthetic treatment of philosophical systems, religious beliefs, and works of art from antiquity to the twentieth century.Taylor's interest in humanistic education led to his selection in 1951-52 as a Ford Foundation Faculty Fellow for the study of interdisciplinary programs in the Humanities. During the summer of 1958, he chaired a faculty seminar sponsored by the Lilly Foundation and was principal author of its report, "The Humanities at Oberlin."

In addition to his coordination of the Humanistic Tradition lectures, Taylor was very actively involved in the Oberlin Dramatic Association. Beginning in 1930, he was a regular drama critic for the Oberlin Review and participated in student productions of Shakespeare's plays. His literary and dramatic instincts found further outlet in The Poetry Trio, which he founded in 1953 with professors John Kneller (French) and Heinz Politzer (German) for the purpose of reading poetry aloud in the original language. One of the most popular poetry programs, "Poems About Paintings," was presented at the Cleveland and Baltimore museums of art in 1966.

At the core of Taylor's approach to the humanities and to the educational enterprise in general was a passionate commitment to the American democratic tradition. The upheaval of the second World War, and the social revolutions of the nineteen-sixties and seventies,reconfirmed his support for academic freedom and civil liberties. Throughout the years of the governance controversy at Oberlin College, from 1945 to the end of his life, Taylor lifted his voice against the abrogation of faculty power. He served as faculty gadfly for the administrations of presidents William E. Stevenson (1945-59), Robert Kenneth Carr (1960-70), Robert Works Fuller (1970-74), Emil Charles Danenberg (1975-81), and S. Frederick Starr (1983- ), restating to each administration his understanding of the purpose of Oberlin. On the question of faculty governance, he was one of the earliest to challenge the views of college trustee, Erwin N. Griswold (b. 1904).

Taylor's support for faculty governance and academic freedom animated his service to the Association of American University Professors. From 1943 to 1947, he served as President of the Oberlin College Chapter. In 1953, he was named to the Association's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, a post he held for twelve years. He also served as Chairman of the A.A.U.P. Committee on Organization. From 1958 to 1960, he served as the national Association's First Vice President.

Warren Taylor was a gifted writer. His essays, articles, talks, and reviews display a vigor of expression rare among academics. His drama criticism, particularly of Shakespeare, is especially piercing. During the late twenties and early thirties, several of his poems appeared in southern avant-garde poetry periodicals, including Blues, A Magazine of New Rhythms based in Columbus Mississippi, and Bozart, a bimonthly review based in Atlanta, Georgia. Taylor co-edited, with Donald Hall, the anthology entitled Poetry in English, published by Macmillan in 1963. In 1966, he published a collection of texts for use in English composition courses, Models for Thinking and Writing (World). His output of essays and articles includes "The Meaning of Teaching" (1941); "Education and the Criticism of Life" (1942); "What Colleges Learn from War" (1943); "The Moral Obligation of a College" (1953); "Educational Myopia: Eight Causes and Treatments" (1962); "The Primacy of the Person" (1968); and "The Achievement of Oberlin College" (1969).These and other writings take up a theme to which Taylor returned again and again: the role of liberal education in democratic society.

Warren Taylor married Adele Elizabeth Wanner (A.B. Oberlin, 1934) on 26 August 1933. They had four sons: Geoffrey Warren (A.B. Oberlin 1957), J. Ransom, Thomas William, and William Dickinson. Warren Taylor died in Oberlin on 27 February 1991 at the age of 87.