Walker Percy

Walker Percy (born May 28, 1916, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.—died May 10, 1990, Covington, Louisiana) was an American novelist who wrote of the New South transformed by industry and technology.

Orphaned in late childhood after his father, a lawyer, committed suicide and his mother died in an automobile accident, Percy went with his brothers to live with their father’s cousin, a bachelor and lawyer, in Greenville, Mississippi. Percy studied at the University of North Carolina (B.A., 1937) and Columbia University (M.D., 1941) and, while working as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital, New York City, contracted tuberculosis, compelling him to rest at an upstate New York sanatorium. While recovering he read widely, was attracted to the works of European existentialists, and decided on a career in writing. He also converted to Roman Catholicism.

During the 1950s Percy wrote articles for philosophical, literary, and psychiatric journals. Not until 1961 was his first novel published: The Moviegoer, an existentialist work in which a jaded stockbroker seeks escape from the real world through frequent viewings of movies, where he finds at least a simulacrum of a search for meaning. The Moviegoer won a National Book Award and introduced Percy’s concept of “Malaise,” a disease of despair born of the rootless modern world. Other fiction included The Last Gentleman (1966); Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time near the End of the World (1971), a science-fiction novel that brings a lighter comic touch to Percy’s treatment of “Malaise”; Lancelot (1977), an allegory of the King Arthur legend told through the reflections of a wife-murderer in a mental institution; The Second Coming (1980); and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). He also wrote such nonfiction as The Message in the Bottle (1975), a sophisticated philosophical treatment of semantics, and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1985), an offbeat amalgam of a self-help-book parody and a philosophical treatise.