SOURCE: "Notes on Nature in the Fiction of Reynolds Price," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XV, No. 2, 1973, pp. 83-94.

In the following excerpt, Shepherd traces the various connections between the natural world and human consciousness in Price's short fiction.

Reynolds Price is not a writer in whose work nature and the relation of man and nature seem of the first importance, as they do, in different senses, in the fiction of Faulkner, Warren, Wolfe, O'Connor, or Dickey. Whatever the difficulties, though not because of them, Price is not given to celebrating nature. Beyond the dark pastoral of A Long and Happy Life (1962) and the jokes-in-character turned rather grim romance of A Generous Man (1966), an engagement with nature is consistently evident in Price's fiction through which characters receive or miss messengers, signs, emblems from the world of nature, whole lives changed in the process. "It was messenger...