A professorship in creative writing honoring renowned novelist, playwright, essayist and Duke University alumnus Reynolds Price will be established at Duke, President Richard H. Brodhead announced during a "jubilee" this weekend marking Price's 50-year teaching career at the university.
The Homeland Foundation will give $1.25 million, which will be matched by The Duke Endowment, to endow the Reynolds Price Professorship.
At a dinner honoring Price on Friday night, Duke Provost Peter Lange said the new professorship will go to "a creative writer and a scholar of true eminence and excellence in the field of creative writing who shall make a significant contribution to undergraduate teaching at Duke - -- as close as we can come to Reynolds himself."
The writing and teaching of Price, James B. Duke Professor of English and a 1955 summa cum laude graduate of Duke's Trinity College, were celebrated at the university Jan. 31-Feb. 2. More than 1,000 guests and current Duke students heard participants during the jubilee that included Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and many of Price's fellow writers, colleagues and former students.
Price, a native of North Carolina, was a Rhodes Scholar and studied in Oxford, England, with W.H. Auden and Lord David Cecil. He returned to the United States and began teaching at Duke in 1958.
In 1962, his novel "A Long and Happy Life" received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel and has never been out of print. Price has published numerous books since then, including the novel "Kate Vaiden," which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.
Price has written volumes of stories, poems, plays, essays and two memoirs, including "A Whole New Life," which is his account of his survival of spinal cancer.
The Homeland Foundation, located in Amenia, N.Y., supports educational and cultural institutions throughout the world. Its president, 1955 Duke graduate E. Lisk Wyckoff Jr., is a college classmate and long-time friend of Price's. A generous supporter of Duke, Wyckoff also established the Chauncey Stillman Professorship in Ethics in 2003.
"The Trustees of Homeland Foundation initiated and made its grant for the Reynolds Price Professorship not only to honor Reynolds' extraordinary will and brilliance, but also to perpetuate the profound and creative legacy he has established at Duke," Wyckoff said. "In particular, I hope that the occupants of this chair will dedicate themselves to molding the intellectual lives of undergraduates, as has Reynolds in his distinguished teaching and writing career."
The Duke Endowment Strategic Faculty Initiative Challenge Fund was announced on Jan. 9, 2008, as part of a $40 million gift from The Duke Endowment of Charlotte to create 32 new faculty positions. The gift provides $15 million in matching funds to endow 12 new full professorships for scholar-teachers chosen for their ability to make innovative contributions to undergraduate education. The gift helps Duke fulfill two of the primary goals of the university's strategic plan, "Making a Difference": to attract and retain outstanding faculty and to increase mentored research opportunities for undergraduates.