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Obituaries

Reynolds Price, 77, award-winning writer and scholar, dies

Reynolds Price, 77, poet, novelist, biblical scholar, and linguist, died Thursday after a heart attack Sunday. While compiling an impressive list of literary achievements, he served for more than 50 years as a professor of English at Duke University - although, when he began, he thought it would be for only three years.

    by John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer
    Published 

Reynolds Price, 77, poet, novelist, biblical scholar, and linguist, died Thursday after a heart attack Sunday. While compiling an impressive list of literary achievements, he served for more than 50 years as a professor of English at Duke University - although, when he began, he thought it would be for only three years.

Born in Macon, N.C., Mr. Price graduated summa cum laude from Duke, was a Rhodes scholar, and studied at Merton College, Oxford, with teachers such as W.H. Auden. He returned to the United States and got, to his disappointment, a three-year terminal position at Duke, in Durham, N.C., in 1958.

He made the most of it - for the next 53 years. (He was asked to stay on at Duke.) His first novel, A Long and Happy Life (1962), won the William Faulkner Award for a first novel; Mr. Price was to regret and bridle at frequent comparisons between his work and Faulkner's.

In the classrooms, his passions were John Milton, creative writing, the Bible, languages, and English itself. In his rich voice, freighted with accents of the South, he liked to read Halloween stories on campus, which became a decadelong tradition.

Among Mr. Price's many books were A Palpable God (1978), a collection of translations from and essays on the Bible; Kate Vaiden (1986), a novel that earned the National Book Critics Circle Award; Clear Pictures (1989), a memoir that was a Pulitzer finalist; and Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back (2009), another memoir, in which he wrote openly, after long reticence, about being gay.

In 1984, Mr. Price was confined to a wheelchair by a cancerous tumor on his spine. His subsequent sufferings did not dim what he called his "outlaw" Christianity. He told the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer in 2006 that "the fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by 25 X-ray treatments . . . was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life."

Mr. Price asked that he not be given a public funeral. Duke had not yet announced plans to honor him.