In the summer after he published A Long and Happy Life in 1962, and won the William Faulkner Award, Reynolds Price returned to North Carolina. He went on to publish thirty-nine full-length volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations, and to teach at Duke University for more than five decades.
With the profit from a never-produced screenplay, Price bought a sizable dwelling near the trailer-house where he’d completed his first books and continued to work alone in the new house, surrounded by the same trees and animals. He was likewise visited by many friends and occasional loves, none of whom proved residential. In 1984 a large malignant tumor was discovered in his spinal cord; and after radiation and four surgeries at the hands of Dr. Allan Friedman, he settled into full-time wheelchair life. The demands of a disabled existence made it necessary to add accessible quarters to his house; until his death, Price lived there with the steady help of a series of live-in assistants.
Kate Vaiden, the novel he was writing when his cancer manifested itself, was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ensuing years saw Price publish—among numerous other books—A Perfect Friend, his first novel for children and adults; large collections of his short stories and poems; and a gathering of fifty-odd commentaries that he’d broadcast on National Public Radio. His time since the early 1980s included national productions of his six plays—including Private Contentment, a script commissioned for PBS’s first season of American Playhouse. His dramatic trilogy New Music, the forty-year history of a family, premiered at the Cleveland Playhouse in a production that permitted audiences to see all three plays in a single long afternoon or on three consecutive evenings. And his Full Moon, originally commissioned by Duke Drama, appeared at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.
In 1988 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; his work has been translated into seventeen languages; and in the fall of 2008 he marked the fiftieth anniversary of teaching at Duke. He died on January 20, 2011.