Reynolds Price Shares His Latest, Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back
On UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, October 25, at 5 PM

In Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, Reynolds Price’s highly anticipated third volume of memoir, the award-winning author covers his time at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and the years leading up to the publication of his first novel, A Long and Happy Life.

The six years of his life covered in Ardent Spirits, from the autumn of 1955 to the early summer of 1961, are marked by intense stretches of what Price calls “the rarest human privilege – prolonged joy.” The first three years of this period were spent at Oxford, where Price experienced his first chance at both sustained writing and rewarding love. He was back at Duke University for the second three years, and there he was financially strapped but intellectually fulfilled as he completed his novel.

The Oxford – and the Britain – which Price discovered in the mid-fifties had scarcely recovered from the severe demands of the World War II years. Yet he found the University a place of enormous vitality – both academic and personal.  He had never encountered more rewarding teachers (three of them, Lord David Cecil, Helen Gardner, and Nevill Coghill, are described in moving and sometimes amusing detail).  And it is during the Oxford years that Price undergoes the first loves of his life – one with an Oxford colleague and one with an older man. 

In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Sunday, October 25, at 5 PM, Price shares Ardent Spirits’ inspiring account of the beginning of a rich and joyful literary life in the very lucid, eloquent, and frequently witty prose which has won him so many readers since his first publication in the 1950s.

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina, in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke University since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English. 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. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among his thirty-eight 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.

Don’t miss DG Martin’s all-new interview with Reynolds Price on North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, October 25, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During the 26-week season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests will also include:  John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed (Holy Smoke), Justin Catanoso (My Cousin the Saint), Todd Johnson (The Sweet By and By), Michael Walden (North Carolina in the Connected Age), Barbara Fredrickson (Positivity), Michael Davis (Street Gang), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), Howard Lee (The Courage to Lead), Marianne Gingher (Adventures in Pen Land), Dan Barefoot (Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices), John Hart (The Last Child),  Elizabeth Edwards (Resilience), Brett Friedlander (Chasing Moonlight),  Michael Malone (The Four Corners of the Sky), and John Kessel (The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories).

For additional information about series guests and airdates, plus links to Bookwatch on Facebook, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other original productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.