Reynolds Price - Life

Life

Price was born in Macon, North Carolina, and, after attending public schools of his native state, went to Duke University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1955. Afterward, he went to Merton College, Oxford for three years as a Rhodes Scholar and wrote a book about life at Oxford, called The Source of Light. While at Oxford Price formed important friendships with the poets W.H Auden and Stephen Spender as well as the biographer Lord David Cecil which helped to spur his writing career on. After his return in 1958, he started teaching at Duke University, which he did until the end of his life. His first short stories were published in Duke's student literary periodical Archive. Eudora Welty also helped Price get his first couple of books published; she sent one of his early stories, "Michael Egerton" to her own publisher, but Price's first book was not a collection of stories; it was a novel entitled A Long and Happy Life. His other books include his memoir Clear Pictures, and his novels The Tongues of Angels, Blue Calhoun, Kate Vaiden, Roxanna Slade and The Great Circle. The Good Priest's Son, published in 2005, is an account of a 9/11 experience.

In 1984, Price was diagnosed with a malignant spinal tumor. It was treated with radiation therapy, which left him cancer-free but paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Price employed one beginning writer a year, in a sort of private fellowship: in exchange for tending to his daily needs, the young poet or prose writer received room and board and time to write. He wrote about his experience as a cancer survivor in his memoir A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing.

Price died January 20, 2011, after suffering a heart attack five days earlier.