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Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back
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About Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back
Product Description 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. From Publishers Weekly In this new memoir, award-winning novelist Price ( Kate Vaiden) takes up where his 1989 Clear Pictures left off—with a young Price heading for England on a Rhodes scholarship, a young man lighting into new and unfamiliar territories and the lessons he learns about literature, life and love. Covering the years 1955 to 1961, Price chronicles the challenges of living in a strange place, his emotional insecurities and his anxieties about his ability to complete the thesis on Milton, his adventures in Europe with a close friend and his eventual return to his alma mater, Duke University, to teach writing and literature. Along the way, Price recalls his friendships with Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, W.H. Auden and his brief encounters with Jean-Paul Sartre and J.R.R. Tolkien. Price's memoir also displays the tenacious desire with which, after warm encouragement from Eudora Welty and William Styron, he embarks on a round of writing that produces his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, published to acclaim in 1962. Although the detail can be tiresomely meticulous, Price, as usual, powerfully articulates the strength of memory in shaping our lives and gracefully draws us into a literary life lived fully. Photos. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From School Library Journal 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. From Booklist *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 About the Author Reynolds Price (1933-20
