Reynolds Price
Reynolds Price was born in 1933 to Will and Elizabeth
Price in a bedroom of Elizabeth's family home in Macon,
North Carolina. It is said that his mother had such
difficult labor that his father paced outside in the
backyard and made a bargain with the Lord -- spare the
child and he would quit drinking. The child was spared
and in fact, Will quit. He still faced constant worries
about income and jobs, and for years he and Elizabeth
moved from rented room to rented room within a fifteen
mile radius of their family home.
Yet Price fondly remembers the drives out into the
North Carolina countryside with his mother and father
and the attachment they formed to one another. "There
on the rough cloth of the back seat," he says, "I knew for
the first and final time that we were all married --
Elizabeth, Will, and Reynolds. We were three people
who'd trust each other for good and that trust would last
on every side."
Price's interest in writing began early, as a child. When
he played, most often alone, he made up stories and
dialogue and spoke them aloud in the woods. In the
eighth grade his teacher, Ms. Davis, noticed he had a gift
for writing. Another teacher, Ms. Peacock, saw that he
was different, that he thought and felt very deeply for a
boy his age. She understood he would do important things in his
life, that most likely he would become a writer.
Price went to Duke University, where he earned an A.B. summa
cum laude. It was at Duke that Price had the great fortune to meet
Eudora Welty, who, after readinghis story, "Michael Egerton,"
immediately saw his talent. Thereafter, she treated him as a peer.
During Price's third year at Duke University, his father
died of lung cancer. Price says of that moment, "I had
then and have until today no serious doubt that Will and
I agreed silently to a wordless plan, and we understood it
clearer than if we'd discussed it. In this plain room we
were enacting, under torture and in the space of a few
days, a lifetime of the necessary roles that would end
Will's life and certify mine. We were father and son
bound in blood duty. He guarded my life for two
decades. I guarded his death. And in it he taught me the
final lesson of life -- how, hard as it is, death is no bit
harder than the long trek toward it and both things, the
trek of life and death's wide open mouth, can be endured
with dignity anyhow."
In 1955, Price, as a Rhodes Scholar, attended Merton
College, Oxford University, where he distinguished
himself as a writer of great promise. After three years and
an advanced degree, he returned to Duke University,
where nearly 40 years later he still lives and writes. His
novel, A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and
won the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel
and has never been out of print. Since that time, he has
published more than two dozen books. His novel Kate
Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award
in 1986.He has also published volumes of poems, plays,
essays, translations, and two volumes of memoir, Clear
Pictures and A Whole New Life, which is the chronicle of
his ten-year survival of spinal cancer.
"I remember just once," he says of this difficult period,
"in a kind of state of prayer, and just in a state of genuine
anguish, just saying, How much more of this am I going
to have to take. And for the only time in my whole life, I
really got an audible answer, one word, which was, More.
And I had to learn to live with what had survived that
ordeal, which was all of my body that had ever really
mattered to me anyway -- the part that did my work and
that conveyed me to my friends and the people I love."
Price then found himself in one of the most productive
periods of his life. In a three year period he published
five books. New Music, his trilogy of plays, premiered at
the Cleveland Play House in 1989, and its three plays
have been produced throughout the United States, as has
his sixth play, Full Moon.
Toni Morrison says of that period of recovery:
"Everything began to pour out. Not just volume, but
quality. Just incredible, beautiful things. He always had
it, he always had the seed and the blossom and knew that
the nurturing and the water and the soil were already
there."
Reynolds Price is James B. Duke Professor of English.
He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, and his books have appeared in sixteen
languages.
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