The Second Coming Signed First Edition Reference

The Second Coming is the sequel to The Last Gentleman and the novel in which Walker Percy came closest to writing a love story. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1980, it returns to Will Barrett — now a wealthy, recently widowed retiree in North Carolina — who is contemplating suicide while simultaneously falling in love with Allison Huger, a young woman who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and is living in an abandoned greenhouse.

The Novel

The book is Percy’s most hopeful novel — and his most conventional in structure. Barrett’s suicidal crisis is precipitated not by external catastrophe but by the meaninglessness of comfortable retirement. His encounter with Allison — who has invented her own language after years of electroshock therapy and speaks in a strangely precise, childlike idiom — provides the novel with a genuinely moving love story that Percy’s earlier novels had avoided.

The novel won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was Percy’s most commercially successful book since The Moviegoer. Critics noted a warmth and accessibility in the writing that distinguished it from the austerity of Lancelot. The Barrett-Allison love story has been praised as one of the most tender and convincing in modern American fiction.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York Publication date: 1980 Copyright page: First edition per FSG convention

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
• Inscribed copies: $300–$700
• Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $40–$100

The Second Coming offers excellent value for Percy collectors. It is paired with The Last Gentleman as a two-novel arc, and its relative accessibility (both in price and in reading experience) makes it a natural entry point for collectors who find Lancelot too dark and The Moviegoer too expensive.