Walker Percy

Walker Percy (28 May 1916 – 10 May 1990) was an American novelist and essayist whose fiction explores what he called “the malaise” — the peculiar spiritual emptiness of affluent, comfortable, post-religious modern life, the feeling of being “lost in the cosmos” even (or especially) when everything is going well. His novels, set in the American South and written from the perspective of a Catholic convert who had absorbed Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Marcel, diagnose the sickness of a civilisation that has achieved material abundance and spiritual vacancy simultaneously. He won the National Book Award for his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), and published five more novels and two books of philosophical essays before his death.

Life and Career

Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, into a prominent Southern family haunted by suicide. His grandfather had killed himself; his father, Leroy Percy, killed himself when Walker was thirteen; his mother died in a car accident two years later. He and his brothers were adopted by their father’s cousin, William Alexander Percy — a poet, planter, and memoirist (author of Lanterns on the Levee, 1941) — who raised them in Greenville, Mississippi, in a household of books, music, and Stoic Southern gentility.

Percy studied chemistry at the University of North Carolina, then earned his MD from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. During his medical internship he contracted tuberculosis while performing autopsies at Bellevue Hospital and spent two years convalescing in a sanatorium — a period that, like Pascal’s conversion during illness, transformed his life. He read voraciously — Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Thomas Aquinas — converted to Roman Catholicism in 1947, married, and never practised medicine. Instead he moved to Covington, Louisiana (across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans), and devoted himself to writing.

The Moviegoer (1961) — about Binx Bolling, a stockbroker in Gentilly, a suburb of New Orleans, who searches for meaning in a life of comfortable despair, finding temporary relief in going to the movies — won the National Book Award in an upset over Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. The novel established Percy’s central theme: the “everydayness” that anaesthetises modern Americans against genuine experience, and the search (Kierkegaard’s word) for an authentic existence.

The Last Gentleman (1966) — about a young Southerner with amnesia who works as a janitor at a telescope in Central Park — is his most conventionally Southern novel, concerned with the decline of the old Southern aristocracy and the rise of a new, more vulgar South. Love in the Ruins (1971) — subtitled “The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World” — is a satirical, semi-apocalyptic novel about a psychiatrist who invents a device for diagnosing the spiritual diseases of American civilisation.

Lancelot (1977) — a monologue delivered from an insane asylum by a man who has murdered his wife — is his darkest novel. The Second Coming (1980) — in which the protagonist of The Last Gentleman reappears, now middle-aged and suicidal — is his warmest and most hopeful, ending with a love story that is also a theological argument. The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) — about a conspiracy to put chemicals in the water supply — is his most overtly polemical novel.

The Essays

Percy’s nonfiction — The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983) — is as significant as his fiction. The Message in the Bottle collects essays on language, semiotics, and the philosophy of communication that draw on Charles Sanders Peirce and attempt to develop a theory of how language makes human beings fundamentally different from other animals. Lost in the Cosmos — a satirical “self-help book” structured as a series of increasingly absurd multiple-choice questions about the human condition — is his most entertaining and accessible work.

Percy and the Catholic Novel

Percy’s Catholicism is the most debated aspect of his work. He was not a devotional writer — his novels contain no pious characters, no conversion scenes, no unambiguous affirmations of faith. Instead, his fiction operates in the space Kierkegaard described as the leap from the aesthetic to the religious: his protagonists are men stuck in the aesthetic stage (comfort, distraction, irony) who sense that something is fundamentally wrong but cannot name it. The novels’ power comes from the gap between the characters’ inarticulate longing and the theological framework that Percy, as author, knows but does not impose. Flannery O’Connor, Percy’s fellow Southern Catholic novelist, worked through violence and the grotesque; Percy worked through malaise and comedy. Together they constitute the most significant Catholic literary achievement in American fiction.

Critical Standing

Percy is one of the essential American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century — a writer who brought European existentialist philosophy into the American Southern novel and who diagnosed the spiritual condition of modern America with the precision of the physician he was trained to be. The Moviegoer is canonical. His influence runs through Richard Ford, whose The Sportswriter (1986) is essentially a secular Moviegoer, and through a tradition of American novelists who write about spiritual emptiness in the midst of material plenty.

Key Works

• The Moviegoer (1961)
• The Last Gentleman (1966)
• Love in the Ruins (1971)
• The Second Coming (1980)
• Lost in the Cosmos (1983)

Collecting Percy

The Moviegoer (1961, Knopf) in fine condition with dust jacket brings $1,000–$4,000 — it is one of the most valuable postwar American literary first editions. The Last Gentleman (1966, Farrar Straus) brings $100–$300. Love in the Ruins (1971, Farrar Straus) brings $40–$100. Percy signed at events; signed copies are available but valued.