Walker Percy on the dock at Bogue Falaya, his family home in Covington, La.
Photo by Christopher R. Harris
Walker Percy, writer, was born 106 years ago today.
Percy devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age."
A Southern author from Covington, Louisiana, Percy’s interests included philosophy and semiotics. He is known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Percy’s work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility and deep Catholic faith. A neighboring boy his own age, Shelby Foote, became Percy’s lifelong best friend. As young men, Percy and Foote decided to pay their respects to William Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi.
But when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak to him. He later recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch.
In 1961, Percy published his first novel, The Moviegoer. He later wrote of the novel that it was the story of "a young man who had all the advantages of a cultivated old-line southern family: a feel for science and art, a liking for girls, sports cars and the ordinary things of the culture, but who nevertheless feels himself quite alienated from both worlds, the old South and the new America."
Subsequent works included The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980) and The Thanatos Syndrome in 1987. Percy also published a number of non-fiction works exploring his interests in semiotics and Existentialism, the most popular work being Lost in the Cosmos.
Percy taught and mentored younger writers. While teaching at Loyola University of New Orleans, he was instrumental in getting John Kennedy Toole's novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, published in 1980. It was more than a decade after Toole committed suicide due to his despondence over not being able to get his book recognized. It later won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
In 1987, Percy, along with 21 other noted authors, met in Chattanooga, Tennessee to create the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Percy died of prostate cancer in 1990, eighteen days before his 74th birthday.