ot...RIP reynolds price

"Reynolds Price, whose 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, died
on Thursday in Durham, N.C.

...."He is the best young writer this country has ever produced,” the
novelist Allan Gurganus said in an interview for [the NYT obituary]. “He
started out with a voice, a lyric gift and a sense of humor, and an
insight about how people lived and what they’ll do to get along.”

....At Duke University, where he taught writing and the poetry of Milton
for more than half a century, he encouraged students like Anne Tyler and
Josephine Humphreys. Simply by staying in the South and writing about
it, he inspired a generation of younger Southern novelists.

“He made this small corner of North Carolina the sovereign territory of
his own imagination and showed those of us who went away that the water
back home was fine,” Mr. Gurganus said. “We could come back; there was
plenty of room for all of us.”

Edward Reynolds Price was born on Feb. 1, 1933, in Macon, N.C., a town
about 65 miles northeast of Raleigh that he once described as “227
cotton and tobacco farmers nailed to the flat red land at the pit of the
Great Depression.”

....After graduating summa cum laude from Duke in 1955, he won a Rhodes
scholarship to study at Oxford, where he wrote a thesis on Milton, and
developed career-enhancing friendships with the poets Stephen Spender
and W. H. Auden and the critic and biographer Lord David Cecil.

....He was turned down for military service after he stated, without
hesitation, that he was homosexual."

NYT obit, 1/21/11