In the following essay, Schafer and Thompson give an overview of Price's career and writings.

Reynolds Price has moved from detailed examination of North Carolina rural life to an intense concern with the artist's vision of reality. Beginning with the tragicomic saga of the Mustian family (the novels A Long and Happy Life and A Generous Man, and the story "A Chain of Love," now collected in Mustian), he has come in Love and Work and Permanent Errors to wrestle with narrative forms closer to the bone. In the preface to Permanent Errors Price described his work as "the attempt to isolate in a number of lives the central error of act, will, understanding which, once made, has been permanent, incurable, but whose diagnosis and palliation are the hopes of continuance."

This applies to all Price's fiction. A Long and Happy Life is the inside story of...