18 Facts About Reynolds Price

Edward Reynolds Price was an American poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist and James B Duke Professor of English at Duke University.

Apart from English literature, Price had a lifelong interest in Biblical scholarship.

Reynolds Price was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reynolds Price's family, struggling under the economic climate of the Great Depression, resided in the rural North Carolina towns of Macon, Henderson, Warrenton, Roxboro, and Asheboro throughout his childhood.

Reynolds Price devoted a significant portion of his literary studies, as well as his thesis, to English poet John Milton.

Reynolds Price made no secret from his close friends and colleagues that he was gay, but he was not open about the fact until the gay rights movement was in full swing and friends began to die of AIDS.

Reynolds Price preferred to say he was "queer" in lieu of gay.

Reynolds Price wrote about his experience as a cancer survivor in his memoir A Whole New Life.

Reynolds Price died at the age of 77 on January 20,2011, as a result of complications from a heart attack.

Over his career, Reynolds Price produced 38 total novels, short stories, and memoirs.

Reynolds Price is classified as a Southern writer, as his works are often especially associated with his lifelong home of North Carolina.

Reynolds Price wrote his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, and witnessed its publication in 1962.

Reynolds Price composed a memoir entitled Clear Pictures in 1989 which directly led to the production of a Charles Guggenheim documentary about the author's lifetime.

Reynolds Price completed another memoir called A Whole New Life in 1994 which chronicled his journey after the discovery of cancer in his spine.

Reynolds Price entered the realm of pop culture with the release and Top-40 status of James Taylor's song "Copperline," which he and Taylor wrote together.

Reynolds Price lived alone, by choice, for all of his adult life and was openly homosexual.

Shortly after dawn on July 3,1984, in the midst of treatment for his tumor, Reynolds Price awoke in his bed and claimed to have had a life-changing mystic experience and vision in which he came in contact with Jesus Christ at the Sea of Galilee.

Reynolds Price gives an account of this occurrence in A Whole New Life:.