Reynolds Price was born on February 1, 1933, in Macon, North Carolina. His father, William, was a traveling salesman; his mother, Elizabeth, was a homemaker with a quirky, eccentric personality that came to play a direct influence on the focused sense of storytelling that Price was to develop. The author spent his childhood in small North Carolina towns, a fact that shows clearly in his fiction, which is most often concerned with the lives of characters from the Carolina backwoods. His talent as a writer manifested itself early, and it opened doors for him that would change the course of his life. He attended Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, on a scholarship and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University in England. After graduating from Oxford in 1958, Price became an instructor at Duke, and he has remained with Duke ever since then, rising from the...