The Moviegoer was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, on 28 May 1961, in a first printing of approximately 5,000 copies priced at $3.95. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962, beating Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Spinoza of Market Street. The award was controversial — Percy was a complete unknown — and was the result of a campaign by A.J. Liebling, who served on the jury and championed the novel against heavy opposition.
The Novel
John Bickerson “Binx” Bolling is twenty-nine years old, a stockbroker in the suburb of Gentilly, New Orleans. He lives alone, chases his secretaries in an offhand way, and goes to the movies — constantly. The movies are his refuge, the place where the world becomes vivid and comprehensible in a way that ordinary life is not. The novel takes place during Carnival week, leading up to Mardi Gras, and Binx is engaged in what he calls “the search” — a quest for meaning in a world that feels “everydayness,” a grey sameness that deadens all experience.
Binx’s search leads him through the landscapes of mid-century New Orleans: the Garden District houses of his old-money family, the antiseptic suburbs of Gentilly, the French Quarter during Carnival. His Aunt Emily, a Stoic aristocrat, lectures him on duty and honour. His cousin Kate Cutrer, fragile and self-destructive, is the only person who shares his sense of estrangement. They eventually marry — not for love exactly, but for a shared recognition that the search cannot be abandoned even when it cannot be completed.
Percy’s philosophical influences are explicit: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Sartre. But the novel wears its existentialism lightly. Binx’s voice is sardonic, observant, and deeply funny — he is one of the great narrators in American fiction, a man who notices everything and understands nothing, or rather, who understands that understanding is the problem.
Percy and Existentialism
Percy was trained as a physician and contracted tuberculosis during his residency at Bellevue. During two years of convalescence, he read extensively in existentialist philosophy and converted to Roman Catholicism. Both experiences shaped The Moviegoer: the novel is an existentialist diagnosis of American despair conducted by a man who has found, or is seeking, a religious answer.
The Catholicism is present but submerged. Binx mentions God rarely. The novel’s epigraph is from Kierkegaard: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” Percy’s achievement is to dramatise this diagnosis without moralising — to show what existential despair looks like in a specific American place and time, without insisting that the reader reach Percy’s own conclusions.
Collecting The Moviegoer
First edition (1961, Knopf): Approximately 5,000 copies, $3.95.
Identification points:
- “FIRST EDITION” stated on copyright page
- Knopf borzoi device
- Green cloth binding
- Dust jacket with abstract design
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $8,000–$25,000
- Near Fine/Very Good jacket: $4,000–$12,000
- Signed first edition: $15,000–$40,000+
- Without jacket: $400–$1,200
Value trajectory: Strong and sustained appreciation. Percy’s death in 1990 established a ceiling on signed copies, and the novel’s canonical status — it is now taught in most American literature survey courses — keeps demand robust. The National Book Award win adds institutional prestige. Fine copies in jacket are genuinely scarce: the green cloth soils easily, and the jacket’s white portions are prone to foxing and sunning.
The Search
Binx’s “search” — never defined, never completed — is the novel’s great subject. He is looking for something he cannot name, in a culture that has lost the vocabulary for spiritual longing. The movies provide temporary relief because they offer a heightened, aestheticised version of life; ordinary life, by contrast, feels flat and unreal. Percy’s insight is that this flatness is not a personal failing but a cultural condition — the “everydayness” of a society that has achieved material comfort and spiritual bankruptcy simultaneously.