Richard Price

Richard Price is a modern day Dickens (or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky), an author who illuminates the lives of our post-industrial dispossessed and excels at portraying the reality of life in America today. Not afraid to show moral ambiguities, Price hangs in the gray areas and tells searing truths. His deftly rendered characters are complex, unpredictable, and full of soul. Their razor sharp dialogue sings because the author possesses an incredible ear for the poetry of urban vernacular. If it is a writer's job to reflect the society in which he lives, then Price is one of the most important writers working today.

Price's latest novel, Lazarus Man (2024), set in East Harlem, intertwines the lives of four protagonists affected by a tenement building collapse. The novel has been praised for its authentic portrayal of urban working-class life and complex character studies.

Price published The Wanderers when he was only twenty-four. This coming-of-age novel takes place in the multi-ethnic Bronx of the early-1960s. Bloodbrothers' singular protagonist, eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco, is trying to decide what to do with his life. Again Price lays claim to this proletariat coming-of-age story through the tough talk and brutality of street and home. In Ladies' Man, Price pulls away from the mean streets. Thirty-year-old Kenny Becker has made it out of the Bronx to become a household sprays salesman in Manhattan. The arena, though, is now the vacuous 1970s swinging singles scene. The Breaks is another study of a working-class youth trying to be upwardly mobile.

Price returns to the mean streets in Clockers, but character development is not sacrificed to the shock of the violence-ridden, illegal drug underworld setting. Strike, a black crack dealer, and Rocco, a white homicide cop, co-narrate the novel. In Freedomland, the insular chaos of Dempsy becomes ground zero in a clash of racist mythologies.