From Publishers Weekly
The complex dynamics of Price's creative process?complete with stops and re-starts, repetitions and second thoughts? are illustrated in impressive detail in the publication, virtually uncut, of the acclaimed novelist, playwright and poet's working notebooks. From the genesis of his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, through the NBCC Award-winner Kate Vaiden and beyond, the notebooks show the writer outlining themes, experimenting with opening lines, sorting out the characters' chronologies?carrying on an internal dialogue designed to hone his intentions and technique. The long sections devoted to the Mayfield family trilogy (The Surface of Earth; The Source of Light; The Promise of Rest) illuminate how Price takes autobiographical material and alters it to suit his artistic purposes. Mentions of delivery dates and contract negotiations spotlight the business of publishing; Price is notable as an author whose loyalty for decades was to a publishing house (Atheneum) rather than to an individual editor, and the entries suggest that his primary professional relationship has been with his agent, Harriet Wasserman. The writer's fabled discretion about his private life lifts just enough to hint that readers can safely take the bisexual Hutch Mayfield as a close match for his creator, and scattered references to famous friends from Eudora Welty to James Taylor provide breaks from the occasionally daunting density of the work-related material. The dearth of explanatory annotation makes individual sections nearly incomprehensible if one has not read the title in question, but scholars and readers familiar with Price's books will find his notebooks to be an invaluable resource. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Price is one of our finest novelists. His lyrical and evocative prose resounds with the cadences of biblical rhythms, and his narratives are spun of the golden threads of memory and love. Price began keeping these notebooks just a month after his graduation from Duke University in 1955. By then, he had already started down the road to the writing life, and he used the notebooks as his "academy...to set down in a single place anything...that seemed of possible use to the writer I meant to be." The sketches for stories and novels, from A Long and Happy Life (LJ 12/1/61) to his recent Roxanna Slade (LJ 4/15/98), as well as the reflections on his teachers, family, and friends, give us a rare glimpse of the development of one of our master craftsmen. Price's notebooks teach us that writing is a laborious, often torturous, business, accompanied by occasional flights to the sublime taken by the writing soul. To read these notebooks is to glimpse into the growth of a writer from apprentice to master. Highly recommended.?Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., OHCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Renee Tursi
Learning a Trade moves along appealingly because, while Price pulls deep and often from his own memories, he never confuses a notebook with a journal or diary...


From Kirkus Reviews
What Price describes humbly as ``the ongoing minutes of one craftsman's effort through more than four decades to learn his business'' is, in fact, a monumental entree into the extraordinarily restive, creative mind of the South's great elegist and one of America's preeminent moral novelists. Starting in 1955, when the North Carolinian was a young student at Oxford meticulously thinking through on paper his early stories and first novel, A Long and Happy Life, and continuing through the first draft of his latest novel (Roxanna Slade, 1998), Learning A Trade provides a day-by-day record of the evolution of a novelist. Though the prolific writer produced poems, plays, and essays, fiction dominates his attention here. Early on,the notebooks were his de facto writing school, ``the place where I've worked to teach myself the needs and duties and daily procedures of a competent writer.'' We see Price learning his strengths and limitations, discovering how best to work, and developing the rich, poetic language that is his trademark. The notes are a source book (a central repository for ``anything I heard or thought that seemed of possible use to the writer I meant to be'') and sounding board. He tries out bits of dialog, last lines, and first lines; engages in self-debate about possible plot developments; and (a recurring theme) hashes out reservations about similarities between new work and old. For readers, much material will be meaningless without first reading the fiction itself. Price scholars will rejoice in the wealth of detail regarding the inspiration for characters, images, and turns-of-phrase (the title for A Long and Happy Life comes from Bridge on the River Kwai, for example). Writersparticularly beginnerswill savor Price's lucid address of the mundane but essential issues of the writing life. An estimable desktop companion for reader and writer alikea volume remarkable more for its durable flame than for any pyrotechnic flashes. (5 illustrations include drawings by the author) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Card catalog description
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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Learning a Trade, award-winning author Reynolds Price's working journal, provides a revealing window into his creative process and craftman's sensibilities.

FROM THE CRITICS

Renee Tursi

...[M]oves along appealingly because...he never confuses a notebook wtih a journal or diary....Rather, his life is "all int he work...not a secret spared." — The New York Times Book Review

Library Journal - Bettie Alston Shea, Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, NC

Price is one of our finest novelists. His lyrical and evocative prose resounds with the cadences of biblical rhythms, and his narratives are spun of the golden threads of memory and love. Price began keeping these notebooks just a month after his graduation from Duke University in 1955. By then, he had already started down the road to the writing life, and he used the notebooks as his "academy...to set down in a single place anything...that seemed of possible use to the writer I meant to be." The sketches for stories and novels, from A Long and Happy Life to his recent Roxanna Slade, as well as the reflections on his teachers, family, and friends, give us a rare glimpse of the development of one of our master craftsmen. Price's notebooks teach us that writing is a laborious, often torturous, business, accompanied by occasional flights to the sublime taken by the writing soul. To read these notebooks is to glimpse into the growth of a writer from apprentice to master. -- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville Public Library, Ohio

Renee Tursi

...[M]oves along appealingly because...he never confuses a notebook wtih a journal or diary....Rather, his life is "all int he work...not a secret spared." -- The New York Times Book Review

Wall Street Journal

Learning a Trade is a rare contemporary example of [a published working journal], giving us an almost full documentary of the mind of this author of some 31 volumes, including 11 novels, notably Mustian (1983), Kate Vaiden (1986), and Blue Calhoun (1992).

Choice

What a trove Price provides for those who might like to pursue the `trade' that Price has practiced in a career that has produced more than 30 individual books. . . . For most readers-especially apprentice writers and teachers of literature-the real interest will be in the dialogues the writer conducts with himself about what shapes and forms, twists and turns, themes and sentiments given works should have-the thinking out of formal elements. Of course, those familiar with Price's acclaimed work will relish this opportunity to enter his writer's workshop; but even those who have never read a work of his will find both an exhilarating experience and a good practical model for the writing process.Read all 9 "From The Critics" >

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