Award-winning novelist Reynolds Price provides a vivid portrait of his life in the mid-1950s leading up to the publication of his brilliant first novel A Long and Happy Life—detailing his time as a Rhodes scholar, writer, and a teacher. In his third memoir (after A Whole New Life ), award-winning author Price details his life from 1955 to 1961—his studies at Oxford, where he befriended W.H. Auden and met such writers as Robert Frost and Eudora Welty; his European travels; and the beginning of his Duke teaching career. The detailed stories he includes come from copies of letters he wrote to his mother and brother. Two underlying streams in this memoir are Price's homosexuality and the beginning of his first novel, A Long and Happy Life , which he refers to as his "pregnant-girl story." Price's true friendship with an Oxford classmate, Michael Jordan, and his intimate relationship with Matyas, a British academic, reveal Price's personal growth during his studies. He outlines the universal writer's dilemma of working the "necessary job" to pay the bills while struggling to begin a writing career. Readers will identify with his journey and eventual satisfaction. Recommended for all academic collections.—Joyce Sparrow, JWB Children's Svcs. Council, Clearwater, FL Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. *Starred Review* The distinguished American novelist, author of, among many celebrated works, the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Kate Vaiden (1986), remembers being a Rhodes Scholar at England’s Oxford University in the mid-to-late-1950s, when he was in his twenties. Price examines both the three years he spent at Oxford and the following three years, when he began teaching at Duke University in his native North Carolina and completed his first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Many readers will identify with his recollection that “since early adolescence, I’d all but tasted the strong desire to visit Europe.” But few will have had the range of experiences Price enjoyed in England: not only studying the poetry of John Milton at Oxford but also making friends with such literary luminaries as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender and working to become a fiction writer. Scholarship and fiction writing initially seemed at cross purposes to the young Price, but eventually he came to reconcile both impulses. Fans of his fiction are the natural audience for this account, but it will also appeal to anyone interested in literary memoirs. --Brad Hooper Reynolds Price (1933-2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories . A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda After graduating from Duke University, Reynolds Price sailed off to Oxford in 1955, where he spent three years as a Rhodes scholar. During this time he published his first short story and produced a B. Litt. thesis on John Milton's dramatic poem "Samson Agonistes." He then returned to Duke for a short-term appointment as a teacher of creative writing and literature. Fifty years later, Price is still there in Durham, but now as the very distinguished James B. Duke Professor of English and one of America's most revered men of letters. This engaging memoir, however, covers just six years in a young man's life, albeit a life that was unusually rich in friendships and youthful accomplishment. At Oxford, Price's teachers included such eminent scholars as the aristocratic David Cecil, who used to grow so excited in lectures that he would spray spittle on students in the front row; the formidable Helen Gardner, an authority on John Donne with a disturbingly flirtatious way of twiddling with the pendants she always wore; and Nevill Coghill, who had once been the teacher of W.H. Auden. During his holidays, Price also managed to meet some truly famous people: He recognized and spoke with the very young Brigitte Bardot, glimpsed philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre on the street and was given a curt bow, and actually exchanged grins with fat Nikita Khrushchev. Following a performance of "Titus Andronicus," Price was introduced to Vivien Leigh and a nearly naked Laurence Olivier in their dressin