Breaking Away from The Breaks: A Biographical Analysis of Richard Price Anonymous College

Richard Price is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter, writing his first novel The Wanderers while he was attending Columbia University. After this impressive debut he wrote several more novels in quick succession including Bloodbrothers, Ladies’ Man, and The Breaks. The Breaks, written in 1983, was a novel loosely based on his experience at Cornell University. He has said that The Breaks was “[t]he hardest book for me ever to write, and the least satisfying” (“The Art of Fiction”). After writing this novel he struggled as a novelist and turned to screenwriting for movies and television series. While continuing to be a screenwriter, Price returned to writing novels with his famous work, The Clockers. Price admits that his reason for turning to screenwriting after writing The Breaks was due to his inability to come up with new material. This novel was an influential point in Price’s career because it led him to explore a different route in his writing and helped him create new material later in life. While Price admits that The Breaks was his least satisfying novel, it shows his talent as a novelist because it helped shape his writing later in his life and influenced him to change his technique.

Richard Price’s first three...