Learning a Trade

A Craftsman's Notebooks: 1955-1997

Reynolds Price author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:25th Nov '98

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Learning a Trade cover

From Reynolds Price, much acclaimed author of award-winning novels, plays, poems, stories, and essays, comes a work that is unique among contemporary writers of American literature. For more than forty years, Price has kept a working journal of his writing life. Now published for the first time, Learning a Trade provides a revealing window into this writer’s creative process and craftsman’s sensibilities.
Whether Price is reflecting on the rhythm of his day-to-day writing process or ruminating about the central character in what would become, for instance, Kate Vaiden—should she be a woman, what would be her name, why would the story be told in the first person?—he envelops the reader in the task at hand, in the trade being practiced. Instead of personal memoir or a collection of literary fragments, Learning a Trade presents what Price has called the “ongoing minutes” of his effort to learn his craft. Equally enlightening as an overview of a career of developing prominence or as a perspective on the building of individual literary works, this volume not only allows the reader to hear the author’s internal dialogue on the hundreds of questions that must be turned and mulled during the planning and writing of a novel but, in an unplanned way, creates its own compelling narrative.
These notebooks begin in “that distant summer in dazed Eisenhower America,” a month after Price’s graduation from Duke University, and conclude in “the raucous millennial present” with plans for his most recent novel, Roxanna Slade. Revealing the genesis and resolution of such works as TheSurface of Earth, TheSource of Light, Kate Vaiden, Clear Pictures, and Blue Calhoun, Learning a Trade offers a rich reward to those seeking to enter the guild of writers, as well as those intrigued by the process of the literary life or captured by the work of Reynolds Price.


“We have in this fine book a coincidence most fortunate for would-be writers and fellow professionals such as myself: A compulsive keeper of journals over many years who is widely appreciated as one of the most capable authors of this century.
Reynolds Price’s life, while as unique as his thumbprint, turns out here to be a strikingly general anatomy of virtually every good writer’s artistic development from childhood on. I would not have thought that generalizations about growth in such a complex profession were plausible—until this meticulous dissection was shown to me.”—Kurt Vonnegut

  • Commended for Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize (Nonfiction) 1999

ISBN: 9780822321125

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 1080g

624 pages