Walker Percy

Walker Percy (Birmingham, 1916 - Covington, 1990) was an American novelist of the Southern and Catholic literary tradition. His work explores the alienation of the modern individual, the weight of faith, and the limits of science in explaining human existence. He is best known for his novels set in New Orleans, though he had also trained as a doctor.

Raised in Mississippi after the deaths of his parents, deaths he regarded as suicides, he was taken in by his cousin William Alexander Percy, a lawyer and poet. He studied chemistry in North Carolina and earned his medical degree at Columbia University in 1941, intending to become a psychiatrist. He contracted tuberculosis in 1942 while interning at Bellevue Hospital. During his long convalescence in a sanatorium in upstate New York, he read Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Sartre, and began to doubt that science alone could explain the mystery of existence. He converted to Catholicism in 1947 and, after an essay against segregation in 1956, devoted himself fully to writing.

His first major novel, The Moviegoer (1961), follows Binx Bolling, a young man from a well-off Southern family who feels estranged from both the old South and modern America. Percy called this state of detachment "indisposition", and the book won the National Book Award. He followed it with Love in the Ruins (1971), The Second Coming (1980) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), novels in which religion and criticism of contemporary culture are central. He also published essays on semiotics and existentialism, including The Message in the Bottle.

Percy played a decisive role in bringing out A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980, a decade after its author's death, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He died in 1990 in Covington, Louisiana. His influence can be seen in later Southern fiction and in writers who take up faith and meaning in modern life.