Reynolds Price
Reynolds Price was an influential American author known for his profound storytelling and exploration of Southern life. Born in 1933 in Macon, North Carolina, Price gained early recognition for his literary talents while studying at Duke University, where renowned writer Eudora Welty noted his potential. His first novel, "A Long and Happy Life," published in 1962, reflected the dialect and culture of the South, showcasing a recurring cast of characters tied to his childhood experiences. Throughout his career, Price produced a diverse body of work, including fiction, poetry, and essays, often delving into themes of faith, love, and the complexities of human relationships. Notable novels include "Kate Vaiden" and "Blue Calhoun," which continue to resonate with readers today. Price's literary achievements were recognized with a membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In later years, he faced significant health challenges but continued to write, producing a memoir chronicling his experiences. Price passed away in 2011, leaving behind a rich legacy of Southern literature that captures the essence of its characters and their stories.
Reynolds Price
American novelist, short-story writer, and poet
- Born: February 1, 1933
- Birthplace: Macon, North Carolina
- Died: January 20, 2011
- Place of death: Durham, North Carolina
Biography
When William Blackburn in the early 1950s arranged Eudora Welty’s visit to Duke University to give a reading and comment on the work of undergraduates interested in creative writing, Edward Reynolds Price’s sample stood out among those of the others she saw. (A decade later, Price was back at Duke, after completing a residence at Merton College, Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar and from which he received a bachelor of letters degree in 1958.) Welty not only gave Price perceptive critiques of his early writing but also helped him to place A Long and Happy Life, which was published in 1962. It was through her interest and intervention that Harper’s magazine agreed to publish his first novel in its April 1962 issue, thereby giving an unprecedented vote of confidence to an unknown author.
A Long and Happy Life, an ironic, bittersweet love story, seethes with the atmosphere, loquaciousness, and dialect of Price’s native Macon, North Carolina, just south of the Virginia border, where he was born in 1933 to William Solomon and Elizabeth Rodwell Price. Rosacoke Mustian loves Wesley Beavers, who scarcely knows she exists. When she finally yields to him sexually, after having denied him for some time, he forgets her name and says, “Thank you, May,” as he is leaving. Rosacoke soon realizes that she is pregnant. Her marriage to Wesley will not be the love match she had romanticized but rather a marriage into which a reluctant father is forced by the social pressures of his community. Price used many of his characters in more than one story, and the Mustian clan kept cropping up in his work, especially Rosacoke and her brother Rato, short for Horatio. The South of which Price wrote has a stable catalog of characters; his novels and stories reflect this stability. He was at his best when he depicted the small Southern towns he knew well and the people in them, most of them recalled from vivid childhood memories. Moreover, he was particularly effective in capturing the mental processes and vernacular of young children, as is evident most notably in A Long and Happy Life, A Generous Man, Kate Vaiden, and Blue Calhoun.
A Generous Man is particularly interesting for its frank phallic symbolism. Milo Mustian, a boy of fifteen, is an impatient virgin. The crux of the story is that a traveling circus has lost its python, Death. The python is thought to have hydrophobia, creating an outrageous phallic image. The impotent sheriff, whose wife sleeps with anyone who can satisfy her, is named Rooster. Rooster is hunting for the python just as Milo is losing his virginity to Rooster’s wife. A Generous Man is funny if heavy-handed in its symbolism. Price also wrote some of the most sensitive short stories in twentieth-century American literature. The early story that Eudora Welty had read, “Thomas Egerton,” capitalizes on the same local color, meticulously recreated, that pervades his novels. “The Names and Faces of Heroes,” the title story for his first collection, demonstrates how successfully Price captures the psychology of a child. Even in the novel that focuses most closely on life in academia, Love and Work, Price does not stray far from home. The protagonist, Thomas Elborn, a thirty-four-year-old college professor, is Wesley Beavers come of age.
Two of his novels, The Surface of Earth and The Source of Light, present sequential views of the lives of a single cast of characters. Kate Vaiden, a particularly well-received novel, contains many echoes of Price’s early work. A collection of essays, Things Themselves, is interesting for its literary essays on such notable authors as John Milton (on whom Price taught courses), William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Some of the essays from Things Themselves were included in a later collection, A Common Room, which also includes much new material. Price introduces his retelling of thirty biblical stories, published under the title A Palpable God, with a fascinating essay on the nature of stories and storytelling. Price’s poetry, too, was well received, particularly the first collection, Vital Provisions.
In 1984, Price underwent surgery for cancer of the spinal cord which resulted in paraplegia. The condition did not kill his spirit, however, and he subsequently enjoyed one of the most productive periods of his career. In A Whole New Life, he published a compelling chronicle of his illness and its aftermath. In 1988, in recognition of his achievements, Price was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his Collected Stories was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.
While Price published two novels at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Noble Norfleet (2002) and The Good Priest's Son (2005), he mainly turned to nonfiction, including memoirs, in the final years of his life. In addition to A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined (2003) and Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith (2006), which focus on his faith and the role it played in his life, he published Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back (2009), which chronicles his life during the mid-1950s, prior to the publication of his first novel. Price died of a heart attack on January 20, 2011, at age seventy-seven. The following year, the incomplete manuscript of the volume of memoir that he had been working on at the time of his death, detailing the period in his life in which he published his first novel and adjusted to turning thirty years old, was published as Midstream: An Unfinished Memoir.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
A Long and Happy Life, 1962
A Generous Man, 1966
Love and Work, 1968
The Surface of Earth, 1975
The Source of Light, 1981
Mustian: Two Novels and a Story, Complete and Unabridged, 1983
Kate Vaiden, 1986
Good Hearts, 1988
The Tongues of Angels, 1990
Blue Calhoun, 1992
The Honest Account of a Memorable Life: An Apocryphal Gospel, 1994
The Promise of Rest, 1995
Roxanna Slade, 1998
Noble Norfleet, 2002
The Good Priest's Son, 2005
Short Fiction:
The Names and Faces of Heroes, 1963
Permanent Errors, 1970
The Foreseeable Future: Three Long Stories, 1991
The Collected Stories, 1993
Drama:
Early Dark, pb. 1977
Private Contentment, pb. 1984
New Music: A Trilogy, pr. 1989
Full Moon, and Other Plays, pb. 1993
Teleplay:
House Snake, 1986
Poetry:
Late Warning: Four Poems, 1968
Lessons Learned: Seven Poems, 1977
Nine Mysteries (Four Joyful, Four Sorrowful, One Glorious), 1979
Vital Provisions, 1982
The Laws of Ice, 1986
The Use of Fire, 1990
The Collected Poems, 1997
Nonfiction:
Things Themselves: Essays and Scenes, 1972
A Common Room: Essays, 1954–1987, 1987
Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides, 1989
Conversations with Reynolds Price, 1991 (Jefferson Humphries, editor)
A Whole New Life, 1994
Three Gospels, 1996
Learning a Trade: A Craftsman’s Notebooks, 1955–1997, 1998
Letter to a Man in the Fire: Does God Exist and Does He Care?, 1999
Feasting the Heart: Fifty-two Essays for the Air, 2000
A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined, 2003
Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith, 2006
Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, 2009
Midstream: An Unfinished Memoir, 2012
Translations:
Presence and Absence: Versions from the Bible, 1973
Oracles: Six Versions from the Bible, 1977
A Palpable God: Thirty Stories Translated from the Bible with an Essay on the Origins and Life of Narrative, 1978
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
A Perfect Friend, 2000
Bibliography
Black, James T. “A Conversation with Reynolds Price.” Southern Living 27 (September, 1992): 38. A brief biographical sketch of Price’s life; discusses the ways in which families deal with crisis in his fiction.
Fodor, Sarah J. “Outlaw Christian: An Interview with Reynolds Price.” The Christian Century 112 (November 22-29, 1995): 1128-1131. Price discusses eroticism in literature, the role of children in his fiction, the women in his novels, the importance of solitude in his life, his views on religion and the author Flannery O’Connor.
Henry, William A. “The Mind Roams Free.” Time 143 (May 23, 1994): 66-68. A brief biographical account, focusing on Price’s struggle with spinal cancer and the significant amount of work he has written since being told a decade ago he would not survive it.
Humphries, Jefferson, ed. Conversations with Reynolds Price. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. In these fifteen interviews, which originally appeared between 1966 and 1989 in literary quarterlies, student literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, Price speaks articulately and frankly. The collection is indexed and includes a chronology and an informative introduction.
Powell, Tara. “The Fiction of Mercy: Suffering Delight in Reynolds Price’s The Promise of Rest.” Mississippi Quarterly 53 (Spring, 2000): 251–264. Looks at Price’s depiction of suffering and salvation within a Christian context in his novel.
Price, Memsy. "On Reading the Papers Reynolds Price Left Behind." Indy Week, 6 June 2012, www.indyweek.com/indyweek/on-reading-the-papers-reynolds-price-left-behind/Content?oid=3081166. Accessed 1 June 2017. Discusses Price's legacy, focusing on the publication of his last, unfinished manuscript.
Price, Reynolds. Interview by Wendy Smith. Publishers Weekly 241 (May 9, 1994): 51–52. Price discusses his sense of malevolent fate, his troubled family history, his discovery of himself as a writer, his previous works, and the process of writing about his ordeal with cancer.
Rooke, Constance. Reynolds Price. Twayne’s United States Authors series. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Focuses on Price’s consistency of vision. After a brief biography and discussion of Price within a literary and geographical context, this study analyzes each of his first seven volumes of fiction—including his first two short-story collections—in detail. Includes a chronology and a select bibliography.
Sadler, Lynn Veach. “Reynolds Price and Religion: The ‘Almost Blindlingly Lucid’ Palpable World.” Southern Quarterly 26 (Winter, 1988): 1–11. This article examines religious underpinnings, especially the influence of biblical narrative, in Price’s fiction, and also investigates Price’s perceptions of the deeper reality of life underlying what is commonly visible.
Schiff, James A., ed. Critical Essays on Reynolds Price. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. A good first stop for the student of Price. Includes a bibliography and an index.
Schiff, James A., ed. Understanding Reynolds Price. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. A general introduction to Price’s work, focusing primarily on the novels, but also commenting on the relationship of Price’s short stories to his longer fiction and memoirs.
Stevenson, John W. “The Faces of Reynolds Price’s Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1966): 300–306. Although this article deals only with the stories in Price’s first collection, its perceptive insights provide a thoughtful foundation from which to approach the evolution of Price’s work.