February 1: Reynolds Price (b. 1933)

Your chance of rescue from any despair lies, if it lies anywhere, in your eventual decision to abandon the death watch by the corpse of your old self and to search out a new inhabitable body.

--Reynolds Price

North Carolina writer, Duke English professor, former Rhodes scholar Reynolds Price was born on this date in 1933, in Macon NC. He's been using a wheelchair since the mid-1980s, when he survived a spinal cancer that was considered terminal by his doctors. His A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (Athenaeum reprint 1994; also available as an audiobook) is a cancer memoir about the spiritual and psychological aspects of his recovery and pain management; Feasting the Heart: Fifty-two Commentaries for the Air (Scribner 2000) compiles many of his NPR essays, including several on disability ("Wheelchair Travel," "Eye Level to a Wheelchair," "The Last Great Weeper").