Reynolds Price Dies At 77
“Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers.†That’s the first sentence from “A Long and Happy Life,” the 1962 debut novel of Reynolds Price, who has just died at the age of 77. Reynolds often wrote about ordinary people in rural North Carolina, and, more recently, about his own life, from his days as a gay young buck to his later years, when a spinal tumor resulted in him being paraplegic.
