The Last Gentleman Signed First Edition Reference

The Last Gentleman is Walker Percy’s second novel, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1966. It follows Will Barrett, a young Mississippian working as a humidification engineer in a New York department store, who is suffering from “déjà vu” episodes and a pervasive sense of dislocation. After encountering the Vaught family in Central Park through a telescope, Barrett embarks on a picaresque journey through the American South that becomes both a road novel and a philosophical quest.

The Novel

Where The Moviegoer was compressed and controlled, The Last Gentleman is expansive and digressive. Barrett’s journey takes him from New York through the Deep South to the desert Southwest, and the novel accumulates characters, situations, and philosophical tangents with a looseness that divides readers. Some find it Percy’s richest novel; others find it structurally undisciplined.

The book’s central preoccupation is with what Percy called “the dislocation of man in the modern age” — Barrett is literally lost, unable to orient himself in either the old South of his ancestors or the new America of mass culture and civil rights upheaval. His encounters with the Vaught family — particularly the dying Jamie Vaught, whose final moments provide the novel’s climactic scene — give the philosophical themes a human urgency.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York Publication date: 1966 Copyright page: First edition per FSG convention

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first edition, fine/fine: $500–$1,500
• Inscribed copies: $700–$2,000
• Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $100–$300

Collecting Notes

The Last Gentleman is the natural second acquisition after The Moviegoer for Percy collectors. It introduces Will Barrett, who would return in The Second Coming (1980), making it the first half of a two-novel arc. The book’s moderate pricing makes it accessible, and signed copies appear with reasonable frequency.