Samuel Jared Taylor (born September 15, 1951) is an American white supremacist and editor of American Renaissance, an online magazine espousing such opinions, which was founded by Taylor in 1990.

He is also the president of American Renaissance's parent organization, New Century Foundation, through which many of his books have been published. He is a former member of the advisory board of The Occidental Quarterly and a former director of the National Policy Institute, a Virginia-based white nationalist think tank. He is also a board member and spokesperson of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Taylor and many of his affiliated organizations have been accused of promoting racist ideologies by civil rights groups, journalists, and academics studying racism in the United States.

Samuel Jared Taylor was born on September 15, 1951, to Christian missionary parents from Virginia in Kobe, Japan. He lived in Japan until he was 16 years old and attended Japanese schools up to the age of 12, becoming fluent in Japanese.

He attended Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1973. Taylor then spent three years in France and received a Master of Arts degree in international economics at Sciences Po in 1978. During a period that interrupted his undergraduate and later graduate college years, he worked and traveled extensively in West Africa, improving his French in the Francophone regions of the continent. Taylor is fluent in French, Japanese, and English.

Taylor worked as an international lending officer for the Manufacturers Hanover Corporation from 1978 to 1981, and as West Coast editor of PC Magazine from 1983 to 1988. He has also taught Japanese at the Harvard Summer School, and worked as a courtroom translator.

In the 1980s, at the time of the country's strong economic growth, Taylor was viewed as a "Japan expert" in the mainstream media. In 1983 he published a well-received book on Japanese culture and business customs entitled Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the Japanese Miracle. While critical of certain aspects of Japanese culture, Taylor argued that Japanese society was more successful in solving social issues than the West, with lower crime rates and a similar or higher standard of living.

Sometime in his early thirties, Taylor reassessed the liberal and cosmopolitan viewpoint commonly professed in his working environment, which he had himself shared until then. He became deeply convinced that human beings are tribal in nature and feelings, and that they differ in talent, temperament and capacity. In the mid-1980s, he developed an interest in the emerging fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, especially in the controversial works of Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton and Helmuth Nyborg, and came to believe that differences between human beings are largely of genetic origin, and therefore quasi-immutable. All the social miracles of Japan, Taylor averred by 1991 under the pen name Steven Howell, were at least partly a result of Japan's racial and cultural homogeneity.