Reynolds Price, 1933-2011

last updated 8 January 2015

Diagnosed in 1984 with a cancer that attacked his spine, Reynolds Price was cured by surgery and radiation that left him paralyzed from the waist down and in constant pain. He was treated with hypnosis to help him manage the pain; it also unlocked his memory. In his remaining years, words poured out of him, including three volumes of memoirs, as well as stories, novels, poems, and song lyrics.

Price was a quintessentially Southern writer who found it “degrading” to be called a Southern writer, said the Los Angeles Times. “None of my characters are hillbillies,” he acidly explained. Born in North Carolina in 1933, he credited his mother, whom he called “a free spirit,” for his powers of observation. His first novel, A Long and Happy Life, won the William Faulkner Award for its tale of Rosacoke Mustian, the first of many powerful women to populate his fiction. Among his other novels were Kate Vaiden, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986, and the “epics” The Surface of the Earth and The Source of Light.

Entering Duke University as a freshman in 1951, Price caught the eye of novelist Eudora Welty, “who impressed on him the importance of writing about the place he knew best,” said The Washington Post. She also introduced him to her agent, who helped place his stories. He spent more than 50 years at Duke, teaching a course on Milton and another on narrative prose. Novelist Anne Tyler was among his students.