Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price (born February 1, 1933, Macon, North Carolina, U.S.—died January 20, 2011, Durham, North Carolina) was an American writer whose stories are set in the southern U.S. state of North Carolina, where he spent nearly all of his life.

Price grew up in small towns and attended Duke University in Durham, North Carolina (A.B. 1955), where the works of Eudora Welty became a primary influence on his writing. After receiving a B.Litt. degree in 1958 from the University of Oxford in England, he began his long career of teaching English at Duke.

Price’s first novel, A Long and Happy Life (1962), introduced his memorable young heroine, the naive, spirited Rosacoke Mustian, who loves, becomes pregnant by, and weds an indifferent young man. A younger Rosacoke appeared in Price’s short-story collection The Names and Faces of Heroes (1963), and in the novel A Generous Man (1966) her brother Milo experiences his sexual awakening while searching the backwoods for an intellectually disabled brother, a dog, and an escaped python. The third volume in the trilogy, Good Hearts (1988), resumes the story of Rosacoke in her middle age. Price’s other novels include Love and Work (1968); The Surface of the Earth (1975); The Source of Light (1981); Kate Vaiden (1986), the orphaned heroine of which was based on the author’s own mother; and The Tongues of Angels (1990). He also wrote poetry, plays, translations from the Bible, and essays.

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While writing Kate Vaiden, Price became paraplegic, the aftermath of cancer of the spine. Nevertheless, he continued to teach and write. His memoirs include Clear Pictures (1989), about growing up in North Carolina, and A Whole New Life (1994), which recounts his illness.