Reynolds Price emerged upon the literary scene as a very young and very prodigious writer, with the publication of A Long and Happy Life in 1962. This first novel was and is a whole lot more than a promise-- it remains a fully realized work of art, though only the first of many; Price has published thirty books in different genres since 1962. For most of that time he has also been a Professor of English at Duke University in North Carolina and a teacher and mentor to many fine writers who passed through his hands there, including (to pick one locally prominent example) the novelist Ann Tyler.

Until 1985, Price's reputation rested mostly on his achievements as novelist, short story writer and poet. That year, he passed through a near-death experience which left him partially paralyzed and also opened a whole new phase of his career as, well, an "inspirational writer."

I need to be careful in explaining what I mean by that phrase-- the very word "inspirational" having been corrupted by commercial publishing. There are hundreds if not thousands of junky self-help books and watery tracts that carry that label. What Reynolds Price did is something different. He brought to his own experience of survival and recovery the same meticulous observation and painstaking honesty which make him a great novelist, to produce the nonfiction bestseller A Whole New Life. After followed the mystical thread of that experience into theological commentary and a reworking of certain key passages of Scripture (in, for example, Three Gospels). By the year 2000 he had thus become the logical person for Time Magazine to seek out when that publication wanted someone to write about (to quote the cover headline) "JESUS AT 2000."

Price has described himself as an "outlaw Christian." I will (perhaps rashly) interpret that to mean that for much of his career his mysticism and his inspiration have been expressed in the imaginary worlds which the novelist creates-- and especially in the creation of character. Since A Long and Happy Life, which in many ways is a pure portrait of its heroine, Rosacoke Mustian, Price's stand-out novels have simply borne the names of their main characters: Kate Vaiden, Blue Calhoun, Roxanna Slade. What these novels do is follow the movement of the spirit in the flesh-- to show how the human world becomes what the poet John Keats called "the vale of soul-making."

That is what it means to be an inpirational writer in the uncorrupted form.

A last word (finally) about Reynolds Price's most recent book: Learning a Trade: A Craftsman's Notebooks. This volume, which consists of Price's working notebooks for every literary artifact he produced from 1955 to 1997, is the most exhaustive record of the creative process that I have ever seen or dared to imagine. It goes a very long way to show that creative writing builds upon its inspirations with a whole lot of diligent thought and hard work. For this demonstration, along with the rest of his accomplishments, Reynolds Price has been a real inspiration not only for all of us at the Kratz Center for Creative Writing, but for serious students of good writing everywhere.