Published in the sixties, I read this book in 1988. It was Price's first novel, published in the sixties, and immediately launched a fine career.
From the LA TIMES:
Reynolds Price’s first novel, “A Long and Happy Life,” originally published in 1962, recounted--or, better, evoked--the back-country courtship of the young Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers. Beginning with “Wesley’s impulsive and short-lived abandonment of Rosa at her friend’s funeral, encompassing their awkward sexual initiation, the novel culminated with Wesley’s decision to do the right thing by the girl he’d made pregnant. A quarter century later, it remains a nearly perfect novella. Every page declares the open senses and curious heart of an enormously gifted young writer.
2 comments:
Only read a few shorter works by Price...this does sound promising; I'm thinking how unlikely a cover like that would be at time of first publication...even if it did have a similar approach to its subject.
Hence my digging out the first-edition and first paperback covers for the novel on my Friday's Forgotten Books list post... https://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2025/08/fridays-forgotten-books-links-to.html
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