Reynolds Price Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jeffrey J. Folks

Critical Essay by Jeffrey J. Folks

SOURCE: A review of The Collected Stories, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 370-71.

Folks is an American scholor with a special interest in Southern literature. In this positive review, he remarks on Price's continuing interest in the human struggle against a threatening reality of loss, illness, and death.

Now recognized as one of the South's finest living writers, Reynolds Price is author of the Mustian trilogy—which includes A Long and Happy Life (1962), A Generous Man (1966), and Good Hearts (1988)—and of the highly acclaimed novel Kate Waiden, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. The stories collected here [in The Collected Stories] range from "Michael Egerton," first published in 1954, to "An Evening Meal" from 1992. These four decades of writing, however, were broken by almost twenty years from 1970 to 1990 in which Price wrote no short stories while...
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