The Last Gentleman was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1966, five years after The Moviegoer won the National Book Award and established Walker Percy as one of the most distinctive voices in American fiction. Where The Moviegoer confined its philosophical comedy to a single New Orleans weekend, the second novel sends its protagonist careening across the entire continent — from Central Park to Mississippi to Santa Fe — in a picaresque journey that is simultaneously a road novel, a philosophical inquiry, and a comedy of Southern displacement.
The Novel
Williston Bibb Barrett — “Will” — is a young Southerner living in New York, working as a maintenance engineer at Macy’s and spending his free time in Central Park with a telescope, watching birds and passersby. He suffers from fugue states and déjà vu; he has been in psychoanalysis for years without noticeable improvement. He is, in Percy’s diagnostic vocabulary, a man who has lost the knack of ordinary existence — someone for whom the “everyday” has become radically strange.
Through his telescope, Will spots the Vaught family — specifically, Kitty Vaught, a beautiful young woman, and her brother Jamie, who is dying of leukemia. He attaches himself to the Vaughts and is eventually drawn into their orbit, traveling south to their hometown and then west to a ranch in New Mexico where Jamie will die.
The novel’s structure is that of a quest, but what Will seeks is never entirely clear — not to the reader and not to Will himself. He is looking for something that the modern world has mislaid: a way of being present to one’s own life, a mode of existence that is neither the death-in-life of routine nor the frantic motion of escape.
Percy’s Philosophical Comedy
Percy was a doctor turned novelist, deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Catholic existentialism. The Last Gentleman dramatises Kierkegaard’s concept of the “aesthetic sphere” — the condition of living in possibility rather than actuality, of watching life through a telescope rather than participating in it.
Will Barrett is Percy’s most explicit portrait of the modern everyman: educated, well-meaning, fundamentally decent, and completely lost. He cannot commit to anything — not to work, not to love, not to belief — because commitment requires a certainty he cannot achieve. He is the “last gentleman” in the sense that his gentility, his good manners, his reluctance to impose himself on reality, have become liabilities in a world that demands decisiveness.
The novel is also a portrait of the South in transition. The Vaughts represent the New South — money, mobility, cheerful materialism — while Will carries the Old South’s burden of memory, honour, and inherited melancholy. Percy treats both with affectionate irony.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, in 1966. First printings are identified by:
- FSG imprint on title page
- “First printing, 1966” stated on copyright page
- Price of $5.75 on dust jacket front flap
- Cloth binding in blue-grey boards
The dust jacket features a distinctive design in yellow and black. The novel was a critical success and sold better than The Moviegoer had initially, benefiting from Percy’s National Book Award reputation.
Critical Standing
The Last Gentleman confirmed Percy’s position as a major American novelist. Reviews praised its combination of comic invention and philosophical seriousness. Robert Coles called it “a funny, wise, altogether remarkable novel.” The novel is generally ranked just below The Moviegoer in Percy’s body of work, though some readers prefer its broader canvas and more expansive comedy.
The novel’s sequel, The Second Coming (1980), returns to Will Barrett in middle age — one of the few successful instances of a literary novelist revisiting a protagonist decades later.
Collecting The Last Gentleman
First edition (FSG, 1966): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $200–$600. The novel had a respectable but not enormous first printing, and fine copies with bright, unchipped jackets are genuinely scarce.
Signed copies are uncommon. Percy signed at events and bookstores in the South but was not a prolific signer. Signed first editions bring $800–$2,000.
UK first edition (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967): Scarce. Fine copies with jacket bring $150–$350.
As Percy’s second novel and the predecessor to The Second Coming, The Last Gentleman is an essential title for Percy collectors and for anyone assembling a library of postwar Southern fiction.