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208 pages, Hardcover. First published January 1, 1962. Book details & editions. About the author. Reynolds Price. 172 books113 followers. Follow. Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University.
- A Long and Happy Life Series by Reynolds Price - Goodreads
by Reynolds Price. 3.76 · 128 Ratings · 20 Reviews ·...
- A Long and Happy Life Series by Reynolds Price - Goodreads
May 5, 2009 · The troubled love story of pretty, headstrong Rosacoke Mustian and the motorcycle-riding, stoic Wesley Beavers, A Long and Happy Life beautifully evokes a rural North Carolina now long gone.
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- Reynolds Price
- $15.79
- Scribner
Dec 21, 1987 · A Long and Happy Life Hardcover – December 21, 1987. by Reynolds Price (Author) 4.6 104 ratings. See all formats and editions. On its initial publication in 1962, Eudora Welty said of A Long and Happy Life, "Reynolds Price is the most impressive new writer I've come across in a long time.
- (104)
- 1962
- Reynolds Price
Apr 11, 2017 · Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Topics For Further Study
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
Upon its first publication in 1962, A Long and Happy Life announced the arrival of a major literary talent. Reynolds Price's first novel, published just a few years after his graduation from college, is a tale told in the southern Gothic tradition, regarding the sorrows of a young woman, Rosacoke Mustian, who tries to find love in an obscure rural ...
Reynolds Price was born on February 1, 1933, in Macon, North Carolina. His father, William, was a traveling salesman; his mother, Elizabeth, was a homemaker with a quirky, eccentric personality that came to play a direct influence on the focused sense of storytelling that Price was to develop. The author spent his childhood in small North Carolina ...
Chapter 1
A Long and Happy Lifetakes place in rural North Carolina. It begins in July, with the novel's protagonist, Rosacoke Mustian, riding to a funeral on the back of a motorcycle driven by Wesley Beavers, her on-and-off boyfriend of six years. The funeral is for Mildred Sutton. Mildred played with Rosacoke's family when they were all little, but recently the two young women had not seen much of each other. Mildred died giving birth to a baby, having never told anyone who the child's father was. Ros...
Chapter 2
At church, Willie Duke introduces Rosacoke to Heywood, her boyfriend. She says that they are leaving that afternoon in Heywood's small airplane. Later, when Rosacoke and her mother are looking at a picture of her father, who died thirteen years earlier, Baby Sister bursts in and announces that the airplane just flew over with three people in it. Rosacoke assumes that Wesley has gone back to Norfolk without stopping to see her. She takes her camera and goes to the house of Mildred's mother bec...
A Long and Happy Life is one of five novels that Price reads from on Reynolds Price Reads, an audio collection published from the American Audio Prose Library and available online at www.audible.com.Price discussed the use of his North Carolina as a bonding force in his fiction in "Reynolds Price," a 1989 entry in the Public Broadcasting System's Writer's Workshopseries, released on video by PBS.Landon Allgood
Landon is a helpless man who is addicted to paregoric, a tincture of opium. He has no toes because once, long ago, he fell asleep in a road one Christmas and they fell off. On the day of Mildred's funeral, he is found sleeping in the church. On the day of the Christmas pageant, Rosacoke finds him stealing decorations from the church, which he explains are for his sister, Mary, who is Mildred's mother and is raising her baby, Sledge. Mary promised to give him a hot meal if he would bring her C...
Mr. Isaac Alston
"Mr. Isaac," as he is called, is the rich landowner whom the people in Rosacoke's life look up to. The forest around them is referred to as "Mr. Isaac's forest," implying that nature belongs to him, making him godlike. He is eighty-two years old and has lost most of his mental faculties due to a series of strokes. His one interest in life is horehound candy. The people in the county look to Mr. Isaac as a trusted benefactor: for instance, when Rosacoke's father died, Mr. Isaac came to the hou...
Willie Duke Aycock
A local beauty pageant winner—she won a Dairy Queen Contest the previous summer—Willie Duke has had a crush on Wesley Beavers for a long time. She goes to Norfolk when he does because she has a job curling hair, causing Rosacoke to assume that they are having an affair until she comes home a little later with a new boyfriend, Heywood Betts. Soon after, she and Heywood go to Florida to be married.
Love
Central to Rosacoke Mustian's dilemma in this book is the question of whether Wesley Beavers truly loves her. On one hand, his focus when he is home is on her. He escorts her to picnics and drives her places that she needs to go, such as Mildred's funeral. People kid him about when they are going to be married, and late in the book Sammy Ransom says that he just assumed that they already had plans. Despite their social situation, though, Wesley is distant to Rosacoke in private. He hints at r...
Identity
One of the reasons that Wesley is able to make Rosacoke accept his casual attitude toward their relationship is that she does not know who she is and what she can rightfully expect from life. He, on the other hand, is full of self-confidence. When she asks why he acts as he does, he responds, "Because I am Wesley." When she is upset with him, Rosacoke has one request of him: "Do me a favor…. Say Rosacoke." She needs Wesley to acknowledge her individuality. She looks back to her childhood fond...
Birth
It is of no small importance that A Long and Happy Lifebegins with the funeral of Mildred Sutton, who has died while giving birth to a baby. Mildred represents the camaraderie of Rosacoke's childhood and the mystery of approaching adulthood: having run into her once when she was pregnant, she reflects on how "Mildred knew things that Rosacoke didn't know." Her initiation into adulthood kills Mildred, and throughout the book there are other episodes of birth that are just as significant. Baby...
Point of View
A Long and Happy Lifeis told from a third-person limited point of view. It is third person because the narration refers to all characters as "he" or "she," as opposed to "I" or "you." It is limited because almost all the action described is seen from Rosacoke Mustian's perspective. Events are relayed as Rosacoke remembers or experiences them. Once in a while, the narrative breaks this pattern and gives readers the thoughts of other characters, such as when, after Wesley has sex with Rosacoke...
The people in this novel live in a rural area with electric lights and telephones, but they possess not much more in the way of modern conveniences. Write an essay explaining how the story would ha...Explain the leech that attaches to Wesley's leg when he is swimming in Mason's Lake. What kind of leeches are found in North Carolina? What are their habits? What other species are found around the...At the Christmas pageant, Rosacoke smells paregoric on the baby's breath. Research various potions and elixirs that people have given babies throughout history, including at least one currently pop...Research some of the songs of mourning that you think may have been sung at Mildred Sutton's funeral and play them for your class.The Segregated South
Contemporary readers might be surprised to find the casual friendships between blacks and whites portrayed in this novel. Throughout much of American history, races were segregated in the southern states, including North Carolina, where this novel takes place. Most histories of that region in the 1960s tend to focus on the growing violence between blacks and whites as the Civil Rights movement heated up. Segregation followed from the end of slavery in 1865 and was made into law when the Supre...
1962: The space race is going ahead with full force. The first American orbits around the earth this year. Today: Space travel is taken for granted and is hardly noted in the news. The internationa...1962: Infant mortality—the number of children who die before they reach one year of age—averages 26 out of 1000 in America. This number is even higher in rural areas and for children born outside o...1962: A wealthy aviation enthusiast, like the novel's Heywood Betts, might have a small, propeller-driven biplane, with passengers' heads exposed in the open breeze. Today:A wealthy aviation enthus...1962: Popular music is dominated by white artists. In the coming years, black musicians will begin to directly influence the American music scene through white artists like Elvis, the Beatles, and...Complete summary of Reynolds Price's A Long and Happy Life. eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of A Long and Happy Life.
by Reynolds Price. 3.76 · 128 Ratings · 20 Reviews · published 1988 · 10 editions. In this love story set in North Carolina and Tenne…. Want to Read. Rate it: A Long and Happy Life and Good Hearts.
