Rural Southern writer Reynolds Price dies

Reynolds Price, a writer known for his "vivid evocation of rural Southern life," died Thursday, in Durham, N.C.  William Grimes reports for the New York Times that Price's "novels and stories about ordinary people in rural North Carolina struggling to find their place in the world established him as one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction." Price died of complications from a heart attack.

His first novel, published in 1962,  was "A Long and Happy Life," the tale of Rosacoke Mustian, a young woman desperate to clarify her relationship with an untamable boyfriend, Wesley Beavers, writes Grimes. The opening sentence of the novel: "Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers." Harper's Magazine published the entire novel as a supplement.

For more than 50 years, he taught writing and poetry at Duke University where he had studied with Eudora Welty. His first class at Duke included a promising 16-year-old named Anne Tyler, whom he encouraged to write. "He seemed genuinely joyous when we did the slightest thing right," said Tyler.  (Read more)

New Yorker writer Ian Crouch posts a remembrance of Price, who had been his professor at Duke: "He was a proud member of the university family ... he lamented the occasionally limited emotional and intellectual range of the young people among whom he lived and worked, bridling at their predilection for drunken parties, and taking a special pride, it seemed, in horrifying his students by sharing his distaste for Duke’s men’s basketball. ... He was a commanding presence in an era when fewer and fewer professors are able or willing to strike fear in the hearts of their students. He required attendance, participation, and most of all, preparation." (Read more)