us after 2,000 years and emerges with his own apocryphal Gospel'." Personal life Price lived alone, by choice, for all of his adult life and was openly homosexual. In 1957 he had an affair with the famous British poet Stephen Spender, visiting the Spender family home for Christmas. Shortly after dawn on July 3, 1984, in the midst of treatment for his tumor, Price awoke in his bed and claimed to have had a life-changing mystic experience and vision in which he came in contact with Jesus Christ at the Sea of Galilee. Price gives an account of this occurrence in A Whole New Life: It was the big lake of Kinnereth, the Sea of Galilee, in the north of Israel ... the scene of Jesus' first teaching and healing. I'd paid the lake a second visit the previous October. ... Still sleeping around me on the misty ground were a number of men in the tunics and cloaks of first-century Palestine. I soon understood with no sense of surprise that the men were Jesus' twelve disciples and that he was nearby asleep among them. ... Then one of the sleeping men woke and stood. I saw it was Jesus, bound toward me. ... Again I felt no shock or fear. All this was normal human event; it was utterly clear to my normal eyes and was happening as surely as any event of my previous life. ... Jesus bent and silently beckoned me to follow. ... Jesus silently took up handfuls of water and poured them over my head and back til water ran down my puckered scar. Then he spoke once—"Your sins are forgiven"—and turned to shore again, done with me. I came on behind him, thinking in standard greedy fashion, It's not my sins I'm worried about. So to Jesus' receding back, I had the gall to say "Am I also cured?" He turned to face me, no sign of a smile, and finally said two words—"That too." Reception Despite the success of his best-selling novels and nationwide recognition on the cover of Time, Price has received a lesser degree of recognition than many of his contemporaries in American literature. James Schiff explains, "Despite the praise from reviewers, Price has not received a great deal of scholarly attention – certainly less than other members of his literary generation, such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce