Synopses & Reviews
From the publication of his famous first novel,
A Long and Happy Life, in 1962, Reynolds Price has been accorded the praise and admiration reserved for America's most distinguished writers. (On the publication of that much loved book, Eudora Welty wrote, "Reynolds Price is the most impressive new writer I've come across in a long time. He is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well.") In the years since, he has published many other acclaimed novels (most notably the 1986 novel
Kate Vaiden, which won the Book Critics Circle Award for fiction), collections of stories, poems, plays, criticism, translations and a memoir. Now, with
Blue Calhoun, Reynolds Price has written the most searching, most passionate, most accomplished book of his long, rich and varied career.
As the book opens, Blue (short for Bluford) Calhoun, the narrator, is compelled to examine his past, from the mid-1950s to the present. For Blue, the '50s were a time when the world was in order and he was, finally, at peace: a recovering alcoholic, he had been sober for nineteen months; his marriage and family life were more satisfying than ever; even his job (selling musical instruments) was the best he had ever had. "But then that one day fell down on me from a clear spring sky, no word of warning. It tore the ground from under my feet, and everything around me shook the way a mad dog shakes a howling child."
April 28, 1956, was the day Blue met a sixteen-year-old girl named Luna. And for the next three decades, their love has borne consequences of the most shattering -- and ultimately, perhaps, healing -- kind for everyone they know. As Blue recounts the years and their events for us -- fervently, tenderly, knowing full well his own deep responsibility -- we are made witnesses to a story of classic dimensions, a story of love and suffering, family and friendship, death and redemption.
Synopsis
Since the publication of his famous first novel, A Long and Happy Life, Price has been accorded the praise and admiration reserved for America's most distinguished writers. Now he has written the most searching, most passionate novel of his rich and varied career. Blue Calhoun, the narrator, looks back over his past, from the mid-1950s to the present.
About the Author
Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Reared and educated in the public schools of his native state, he earned an A.B. from Duke University; and in 1955 he traveled as a Rhodes Scholar to Merton College, Oxford University, to study English literature. After three years, and the B. Litt. degree, he returned to Duke where he continues to teach as James B. Duke Professor of English.
In 1962 his novel A Long and Happy Life appeared. It received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel and has never been out of print. Since, he has published other novels -- Blue Calhoun is the ninth -- and in 1986 his Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, translations from the Bible, a memoir Clear Pictures; and he has written for the screen and for television. His trilogy New Music premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1989.
He is a member of the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and his books have appeared in sixteen languages.