$40.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover with vellum jacket
152 pages with 61 color photographs by Alex Harris and 1 historic black-and-white photograph
10.0″ x 9.0″ landscape/horizontal
ISBN 978-1-938086-49-6
Published in August 2017
Distributed by University of North Carolina Press
www.uncpress.org
No e-book has been authorized.
Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Events and Exhibitions
Sunday, April 8, 2018
Interview with Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor on North Carolina Bookwatch, UNC-TV with host Randall Kenan
February 7
Books & Books, Coral Gables, FL
Book Talk and Signing (click here for info)
Friday, October 20, 2017
Interview with Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor on North Carolina Bookwatch, UNC-TV with host Randall Kenan
Wednesday, September 27
Interview with Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor on The State of Things, WUNC with host Frank Stasio
September 30 from 5-7 p.m.
October 25 from 5:30-7 p.m.
Craven Allen Gallery
Book Signing
An exhibit of selected photographs from the book will be held at the Rubenstein Library, Duke University from July through November 2017, with a book signing event on September 28.
Edited by Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor
Nominated for a 2017 Indie award and for the Aperture Foundation’s Photo Book of the Year.
One of 12 finalists in the biography category for a Foreword Indie Book of the Year, known as an Indie Award.
Reynolds Price (1933–2011), who authored forty-one acclaimed novels, memoirs, plays, and collections of poetry and essays, was one of America’s most notable writers of the past half-century. His works have a home on the shelves of millions of admiring readers worldwide. Fueled by a brilliant mind and exuberant spirit, Price’s singular literary voice not only shines a light on the land and people of his native South, but also on the inherent worth of every individual. His enduring belief in beauty, courage, grace, and hope transcends time and circumstance.
Confined to a wheelchair for the last twenty-seven years of his life, Price surrounded himself at home with art and objects that he loved. His eclectic and expansive collection—from the etchings of Picasso to photographs of James Dean, from Greek sculpture to religious icons, from busts of his literary heroes to African masks—created a salon-like refuge in which every wall, bookshelf, and piece of furniture signaled some aspect of his essential self. Through his home, Price conveyed his interior life in a way that few were able to experience—until now.
After Reynolds Price died, Alex Harris was asked by the Price family and Duke University, where Price taught for more than five decades, to document the house before it was sold and the artwork as a living collection disassembled. In this creative work, forty carefully selected excerpts from Price’s writings are interwoven with sixty-one of Harris’s exquisite, meticulous photographs. As we turn each page, it is as if Reynolds Price himself is taking us on a guided tour of his home. And as we move through his rooms, Price reveals his private world, recounts significant episodes in his life and speaks with wisdom and humor about the people, places, ideas, and beliefs most important to him. We also glimpse vital truths about the human condition, finding meaning in our own lives.
Dream of a House is a remarkable book and a surprising tribute to the passions and preoccupations of this uncommonly gifted writer. Here is a work that speaks to long-time fans of Reynolds Price and to those discovering him for the first time. Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor have done what only true friends and fellow artists could provide: a chance to share in the dream of Reynolds Price’s house and his abiding genius.
Read an excerpt from the book in Oxford American
Read an excerpt from the book in The Paris Review
Listen to an interview with Alex and Margaret on WEHC Radio’s “Poets & Writers” (Sept. 2017)
About
About the Author
Alex Harris is a photographer, writer, and Professor of the Practice of Public Policy and Documentary Studies at Duke University. Harris’s photographs are represented in major collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His photographs have been exhibited widely, including two solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York City. As a photographer and editor, Harris has published seventeen books, among them River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life (New Mexico, 1990), with William deBuys, which was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction, and Why We Are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of a Southern City (Liveright/W. W. Norton, in association with George F. Thompson Publishing, 2012), with Edward O. Wilson.
Margaret Sartor is a writer, photographer, editor, and curator who, for many years, has taught at Duke University. Her four published books include What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney (Center for Documentary Studies/Norton, 1999), co-edited with Geoff Dyer, and the memoir Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s (Bloomsbury, 2006), which was a New York Times best-seller, a Washington Post Critics Choice Memoir, and a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year. Her photographs have been exhibited widely and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, among others. As a curator, Sartor has worked with Duke University, the International Center for Photography in New York City, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
About Reynolds Price
Reynolds Price taught at Duke University for more than fifty years as the James B. Duke Professor of English. His duel career as a writer resulted in forty-one acclaimed novels, memoirs, plays, translations, and collections of poetry and essays, including A Long and Happy Life, which won the William Faulkner Award in 1962, and Kate Vaiden, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1986. His work has also been translated into seventeen languages. Price, who received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Creative Arts in 1964 and was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, died on January 20, 2011, in Durham, North Carolina.
Slide Show
Praise
“These images of our dear friend and native son, Reynolds Price, are precious reminders of a lovely life, fully lived and generously shared with those of us lucky enough to have known him. Every page summons the memory of that indomitable spirit and wry conspiratorial humor. How could he be both compassionate and wicked? It is even good to miss him.”
—James Taylor
“Annie Dillard’s famous quotation “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” comes to mind as I page through Dream of a House: The Passions and Preoccupations of Reynolds Price—a gorgeous, fascinating, and inspiring look into the life, mind, and heart of beloved writer Reynolds Price. This is a completely original concept—a biography told through interior photographs of the house Price lived in for forty-six years, literally every inch of it occupied by the art he loved—books, paintings, recordings, films, sculpture, sketches and photographs of friends and people he admired or loved (Buddha, Abraham Lincoln, Leontyne Price, Eudora Welty, Jesus Christ, and James Dean, for instance) artifacts of a passionate life fully lived despite the paralysis which confined Price to a wheelchair for his last twenty-seven years. Each photograph is brilliantly paired with a wonderful quotation from Price’s own voluminous writing, making this unique volume one of the most meaningful and inspirational books about writing and art—and overcoming adversity—ever published. A moving answer to the perennial question, “What is the purpose of art?”, Dream of a House is a treasure for every artist, aesthete, reader, or writer. Kudos to Price’s good friends Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor for their rigorous choices and their own fine writing about their good friend.”
—Lee Smith, author of Key West
“Reynolds Price was my friend for fifty years. We were from the same place and would, in our own ways, journey far from eastern North Carolina to the capitals of the world. He had so many talents as a writer, cultural figure, teacher, and role model. With Dream of a House, what we now have is a look inside his personal world. We can see what he chose and what he valued and what reinforced him. And we can see the connections between those things. Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor help us to see the man in a wider light and to appreciate a huge idea—that is, the connection between the exterior and interior life, between what we know and what we had not known before.”
—Charlie Rose
“This is a beautiful and moving book. I know Reynolds would be proud.”
—Toni Morrison
“I have never had the privilege of witnessing such artistic care and grace taken in the name of another man’s journey, legacy, triumph, tragedy, and all that lies in between—truly fit for the king Reynolds was and for the kingdoms Reynolds’s words will eternally build.”
—Ben Harper, Grammy Award-winning musician
“A writer’s home is the familiar place where their deepest spirits reside, where they craft their creative work. Dream of a House: The Passions and Preoccupations of Reynolds Price is a moving homage to Reynolds Price by his friends Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor. Harris’s photographs and essay and Sartor’s afterword reflect their love for Price as they probe intimate spaces in the writer’s home. Like both his written and spoken voice, Reynolds Price’s house is a richly textured, baroque world, filled with paintings, sculpture, and photographs of people whom he admired, including Eudora Welty, Leontyne Price, and James Dean. By pairing photographs of the home with text from Price’s literary works, Harris and Sartor offer a hauntingly beautiful tour of the artistic world that nurtured Reynolds Price. Dream of a House: The Passions and Preoccupations of Reynolds Price is itself a work of art that frames the home, the passion, and the artistry of a truly great writer.”
—William Ferris, author of The South in Color: A Visual Journal
“Reynolds Price collected passionately all his life, not as an investor but as a man who loved ideas. It’s good that his assembly of thoughtful objects has received this beautiful commemoration. In prose, he defined his emotions as precisely as he could, and his plaster casts and prayer-wreathed icons come with his feelings still surrounding them. They were not decoration. They were looked at. They made his life less of a soliloquy, more of a conversation.”
—Matthew Spender
“For almost half a century, the great Southern writer Reynolds Price lived in the same house in the Durham, North Carolina, woods. He seems to have filled nearly every available flat surface and hanging wall space with collected pieces of art—high and low. His home was a kind of tactile museum of his large and generous mind. That museum is gone now, but we are fortunate to have a record of it preserved in this beautiful book by two fellow artists, the photographers Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor, who lived nearby and loved him much. In addition, we have Price’s own words to help guide us room to room. The book strikes me as something like being able to put on headphones, for this rare exhibit, and then just wandering at will. “
—Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He loved in Life, and Lost
“Dream of a House pays tribute to Price; it also awakens the observer to one of Price’s own observations.”
—Agatha French, Los Angeles Times, read full article here
“Harris’s book is a beautiful tour of the space in which Price wrote. Eschewing captions or annotations, Harris and his wife, Margaret Sartor, declined to identify the faces of those pictured in the snapshot along Price’s walls, or to annotate all the works of art that appear in their book, instead setting the pictures against excerpts from Price’s poetry and prose.”
—Casey N. Cep, New Republic, read full article here
“The two co-editors of this stunning farewell to Reynolds Price came to know and adore him during the wheelchair era of his long, happy, and very productive life.
The title of this exquisite book of photographs and texts, his and theirs, is taken from Price’s poem “The Dream of House.”
—James W. Clark, Jr., North Carolina Literary Review, read full review here
“Dream of a House: The Passions and Preoccupations of Reynolds Price, edited by Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor, is an absolutely beautiful book that offers stunning photographs of Price’s displayed collections of art and artefacts in his Durham, North Carolina, home, which he inhabited for over four decades.
. . . One of the more delightful aspects of the photographs is how they capture Price’s love of mixing the profane and sacred as well as items of historical importance with visions from pop culture.” read full review here
—Oxford University Press Journals, The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 98