Walker Percy
Walker Percy (
May 28,
1916 â€"
May 10,
1990), Southern author, born in
Birmingham, Alabama. During his high school years, his father committed suicide and his mother died in a car crash, after which he and his two younger brothers moved to
Greenville, Mississippi, where his cousin
William Alexander Percy, lawyer, poet, and autobiographer, became their guardian and adopted them. "Uncle Will" introduced Walker to many writers and poets and to a neighboring boy his own age â€"
Shelby Foote, who became Walker's life-long best friend.
Percy attended the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was trained as a
medical doctor at
Columbia, receiving his medical degree in
1941. After contracting
TB while interning at
Bellevue, he was
psychoanalyzed by a protégé of Harry Stack Sullivan. He married Mary Bernice Townsend on
November 7,
1946, and they raised their two daughters in
Covington, Louisiana. Although a prolific
existentialist and essayist, Percy, a
Catholic convert, is best known for his "philosophical novels", the first of which,
The Moviegoer, won the
National Book Award for Fiction in
1962.
Allen Tate's wife, the poet
Caroline Gordon, like Walker a Catholic convert, had helped him improve his style. In
1989 the
National Endowment for the Humanities chose him as
Jefferson Lecturer, for which he read, "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind."
He died of
prostate cancer in
1990 at 72.
As young men, Walker and Shelby decided to pay their respects to
William Faulkner by visiting him in
Oxford, Mississippi. However, when they finally drove up to his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to talk to him. Later on, he recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch.
Percy was instrumental in getting
John Kennedy Toole's
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
A Confederacy of Dunces published in
1980, over a decade after Toole's tragic
suicide.
Novels
*
The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961, reprinted, Avon, 1980.
*
The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966; reprinted, Avon, 1978.
*
Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971; reprinted, Avon, 1978.
*
Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977.
*
The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980.
*
The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.
Nonfiction
The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975.
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1983.
Conversations with Walker Percy.Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.
Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time. New Orleans: Faust Publishing Company, 1986.
State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science. New Orleans: Faust Publishing Company, 1988.
Signposts in a Strange Land. Samway, Patrick, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1991.
A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy. Samway, Patrick, ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
More Conversations with Walker Percy. Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. Tolson, Jay, ed. New York: Center for Documentary Studies, 1996.
*
The Walker Percy Project: An Internet Literary Center*Tolson, Jay,
Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
*Samway, Patrick,
Walker Percy: A Life Loyola Press USA, 1999.
*Wyatt-Brown, Bertram
House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family. Oxford University Press USA, 1996.
*Wyatt-Brown, Bertram.
The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender & The Southern Imagination. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
*Coles, Robert,
Walker Percy: An American Search. Little, Brown & Co, 1979
*
Sarah Dorsey*
Kate Ferguson*
Eleanor Percy Lee*
William Alexander Percy*
William Armstrong Percy, III*
Catherine Anne Warfield*
LeRoy Percy*
Thomas George Percy
