Award-winning Southern author and English scholar Reynolds Price will deliver a free public lecture Oct. 3 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Price will receive the university’s 2007 Thomas Wolfe Prize and deliver the annual Thomas Wolfe Lecture at 7:30 p.m. in Carroll Hall auditorium.
Price’s range and body of work includes novels, poetry, essays, children’s books, stage plays, National Public Radio commentaries and memoirs. With his friend, singer James Taylor, he also wrote lyrics to the songs “Copperline” and “New Hymn.” Writer Eudora Welty was an early fan of Price’s work, and she remained one of his closet friends throughout her life.
Despite a life of real challenges, Price evokes the optimism of one who has experienced “A Long and Happy Life,” the title of his first novel in 1961. Price’s 1994 memoir, “A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing,” describes his bout with spinal cancer, which ultimately left him partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.
Price’s more than 30 books include “A Generous Man” (1966), “The Surface of Earth” (1975), “Vital Provisions” (1982), “Kate Vaiden” (1986), “Clear Pictures” (1989), “Blue Calhoun” (1992), “Roxanna Slade” (1998), “A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined” (2003) and “The Good Priest’s Son” (2005).
Among many honors, Price has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the William Faulkner Foundation Award. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Born in Warren County in eastern North Carolina, Price is a true product of the Depression. His parents lost the family’s home because they could not borrow $50.
After graduating from Duke University in 1955, Price attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He wrote his thesis on John Milton’s “Samson Agonistes.” He returned to Duke to teach writing in 1958, and today is the James B. Duke Professor of English. Price lives outside Durham in a house full of art, where for many years he wrote his books longhand in a cork-lined study.
“The work of Reynolds Price is honest and clear, elegant when it should be, often poignant and funny, and all of it a treasure that is North Carolina’s literary good fortune,” said Lawrence Naumoff, an author, UNC lecturer in creative writing and longtime friend of Price.
The annual lecture and prize honor Carolina alumnus Thomas Wolfe, the author of “Look Homeward Angel.” The event and prize are sponsored by the international Thomas Wolfe Society and Carolina’s English and comparative literature department and Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program, both in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Web site: http://english.unc.edu/Morgan_Program
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu