A voice weíll miss
North Carolina lost a literary treasure last week with the death of writer Reynolds Price. It also lost a revered teacher and mentor who helped inspire and nurture several generations of students, among them Anne Tyler, Josephine Humphreys and Allan Gurganus.
Price was a native of Macon, in Warren County, and lived practically all of his life in northeastern North Carolina. He mined his hard-scrabble childhood and surrounding region for the characters and settings of more than a dozen novels, scores of short stories and essays. Later in life, when the effects of treatment for cancer left him in a wheelchair, he explored his ordeal and its transformative power in ěA Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing.î
Like Eudora Welty and William Faulkner ó with whom he has been compared ó Price found universal themes of love, betrayal and redemption in his own patch of ground. He crafted extraordinary stories out of ordinary lives, revealing keen insight into the soul of his characters and the landscape they, and we, call home.