Walker Percy

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Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American 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, became their guardian.

Percy attended college at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later trained as a medical doctor at Columbia University, receiving his medical degree in 1941. He married Mary Bernice Townsend on November 7, 1946, and they raised their two daughters in Covington, Louisiana. Although a prolific essayist, Percy is best known for his "philosophical novels", the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962.

Percy died of prostate cancer in 1990.

Both Walker Percy and his best friend Shelby Foote greatly admired William Faulkner. As young men, Percy and Foote decided to pay their respects to Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi. But Percy stood in awe of the literary giant and when, one afternoon, they finally drove up to Faulkner's home, Walker Percy could not bring himself to talk to Faulkner. He could only sit in the car, watching Shelby Foote and William Faulkner have 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.

Contents

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Partial bibliography

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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.
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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.
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Outside Reading

Template:Wikiquote Wyatt-Brown, Bertram House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family. Oxford University Press USA, 1996.de:Walker Percy sr:Вокер Перси

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