Walker Percy 57541 224292425 2008-07-08T05:12:44Z Iawas 7295075 {{Infobox_Person | name = Walker Percy | other_names = | image = | caption = | birth_date = {{birth date|1916|05|28}} | birth_place = [[Birmingham, Alabama|Birmingham]], [[Alabama]], [[United States|U.S.]] | death_date = {{death date and age|1990|5|10|1916|5|28}} | death_place = [[Covington, Louisiana|Covington]], [[Louisiana]], [[United States|U.S.]] | death_cause = [[Prostate cancer]] | known = | occupation = Author | religion = [[Catholic]] | spouse = Mary Bernice Townsend | children = | relations = | website = | footnotes = }} '''Walker Percy''' ([[May 28]], [[1916]] &ndash; [[May 10]], [[1990]]) was an American [[Southern literature|Southern author]] whose interests included [[philosophy]] and [[semiotics]]. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels, the first of which, ''[[The Moviegoer]]'', won the [[National Book Award]] for Fiction in [[1962]]. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age;"<ref name="NYT_Conversattions">Kimball, Roger [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F07E5D81238F937A3575BC0A963948260 Existentialism, Semiotics and Iced Tea, Review of Conversations with Walker Percy] New York Times, August 4, 1985, Accessed September 24, 2006</ref> his work displays a unique combination of existentialism, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. ==Biography== Percy was born in [[Birmingham, Alabama]], into a distinguished Mississippi Protestant family whose past luminaries had included a U.S. Senator and a Civil War hero. Prior to Percy's birth, his grandfather had killed himself with a shotgun, setting a pattern of emotional struggle and tragic death that would haunt Percy throughout his life. In 1929, Percy's father used a shotgun to commit suicide. The Percy family then moved to [[Athens, Georgia]], where two years later, his mother died in a car crash when she drove off a country bridge&mdash;an accident that Percy regarded as another suicide.<ref>Samway, Patrick, ''Walker Percy: A Life''. (Loyola Press USA, 1999) p. 4</ref> Walker and his two younger brothers, Phin and Roy, then moved to [[Greenville, Mississippi]], where his bachelor uncle [[William Alexander Percy]], lawyer, poet, and autobiographer, became their guardian and adopted them. “Uncle Will” introduced Walker to many writers and poets and to a neighboring boy his own age – [[Shelby Foote]], who became Walker’s life-long best friend.<ref>''The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage'', by Paul Elie, Copyright 2003, Farrar, Straus & Giroux</ref> As young men, Walker and Shelby decided to pay their respects to [[William Faulkner]] by visiting him in [[Oxford, Mississippi]]. However, when they finally drove up to his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to talk to him. Later on, he recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch. Percy joined Foote at the [[University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]], where he was a brother in [[Sigma Alpha Epsilon]], as was William Faulkner (University of Mississippi), and then trained as a [[medical doctor]] at [[Columbia University]] in New York City, receiving his medical degree in [[1941]]. After contracting [[tuberculosis|TB]] from performing an autopsy while interning at [[Bellevue]], Percy spent the next several years recuperating at the Trudeau Sanitorium in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. During this period Percy read the works of Danish existentialist writer, [[Søren Kierkegaard]], and the Russian novelist, [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]], and he began to question the ability of science to explain the basic mysteries of human existence. During this time (ca. [[1947]]) Percy converted to Catholicism, as well as deciding to become a writer rather than a physician--as he would later write, he would study the pathology of the soul rather than that of the body. <!-- [[Image:Subject's earliest portrait.ext|thumb|Photo caption]] --> He married Mary Bernice Townsend, a medical technician, on [[November 7]], [[1946]], and they raised their two daughters in [[Covington, Louisiana]]. <!-- *[[Subject's Daughter]] ([[birthdate]] &ndash; [[death]]) If notable, provide a brief single-line description. --> Walker Percy died of [[prostate cancer]] in [[1990]] eighteen days before his 74th birthday. He is buried on the grounds of St. Joseph's Abbey in St. Benedict, Louisiana. ==Literary career== In 1962, Percy published his first novel, ''[[The Moviegoer]]'', after many years of work and rewriting in collaboration with editor Stanley Kauffman. Percy 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 (novel)|The Last Gentleman]]'' (1966), ''Love in the Ruins'' (1971), ''Lancelot'' (1977), ''[[The Second Coming (novel)|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]]. Percy was instrumental in getting [[John Kennedy Toole]]'s [[Pulitzer Prize]]-winning novel ''[[A Confederacy of Dunces]]'' published in 1980, over a decade after Toole's suicide. In 1987 Percy, along with 21 other noted authors, met in [[Chattanooga, TN]] to create the [[Fellowship of Southern Writers]]. The [[University of Notre Dame]] awarded Percy its 1989 Laetare Medal, which is bestowed annually to a Catholic "whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church, and enriched the heritage of humanity."<ref>[http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicId=21727 Notre Dame website]</ref> The [[National Endowment for the Humanities]] chose him as the winner for the 1989 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, for which he read, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind.”<ref>[http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/jefflect.html Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities] National Endowment for the Humanities, Accessed September 24, 2006</ref> ==Works== === Novels === * ''[[The Moviegoer]]''. New York: Knopf, 1961, reprinted, Avon, 1980. * ''[[The Last Gentleman (novel)|The Last Gentleman]]''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966; reprinted, Avon, 1978. * ''[[Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World]]''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971; reprinted, Avon, 1978. * ''[[Lancelot (novel)|Lancelot]]''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977. * ''[[The Second Coming (novel)|The Second Coming]]''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980. * ''[[The Thanatos Syndrome]]''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987. === Nonfiction === *''Bourbon''. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press, 1982. *''The City of the Dead''. Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1985. *''Conversations with Walker Percy''.Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. *''The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy''. Tolson, Jay, ed. New York: Center for Documentary Studies, 1996. *''Diagnosing the Modern Malaise''. New Orleans: Faust, 1985. *''Going Back to Georgia''. Athens: University of Georgia, 1978. *''How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic''. Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1984. *''[[Lost in the Cosmos|Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book]]''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1983. *''[[The Message in the Bottle]]: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975. *''More Conversations with Walker Percy''. Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. *''Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time''. New Orleans: Faust Publishing Company, 1986. *''Questions They Never Asked Me''. Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1979. *''Signposts in a Strange Land''. Samway, Patrick, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1991. *''State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science''. New Orleans: Faust Publishing Company, 1988. *''A Thief of [[Charles Peirce|Peirce]]: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy''. Samway, Patrick, ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. ==See also== *[[William Alexander Percy]] ==References== <!-- How to add a footnote: <nowiki> NOTE: Footnotes in this article use names, not numbers. Please see [[Wikipedia:Footnotes]] for details. 1) Assign your footnote a unique name, for example TheSun_Dec9. 2) Add the <ref name="name"></ref> construct to the article body, where you want the footnote to appear 3) Put the content of the reference (ie. what you want to appear in this section) between the <ref name="name">value</ref> 4) Multiple footnotes to the same reference: simply repeat the same <ref name="name"/> at each point. The wikimedia software will do the rest. 5) Don't write anything in this section. The wikimedia software fills this in as a result of the following tag. </nowiki> --> <div class="references"> {{Reflist}} </div> ==Further reading== *Coles, Robert, ''Walker Percy: An American Search''. Little, Brown & Co, 1979. *Harwell, David Horace, ''Walker Percy Remembered: A Portrait in the Words of Those Who Knew Him''. University of North Carolina Press, 2006. *Samway, Patrick, ''Walker Percy: A Life''. Loyola Press USA, 1999. *Tolson, Jay, ''Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy''. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. *Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. ''House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family.'' Oxford University Press USA, 1996. *_____. ''The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender & The Southern Imagination''. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994. ==External links== {{wikiquote|Walker Percy}} *[http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/p/Percy,Walker.html Inventory of the Walker Percy Papers, circa 1910-1992], in the [[Southern Historical Collection]], [[University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill|UNC-Chapel Hill]] *Allen, William Rodney. ''Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer''. (University Press of Mississippi, 1986) *[http://thefsw.org/page/members/charter-members/walker-percy Bio at The Fellowship of Southern Writers] *[http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/ The Walker Percy Project: An Internet Literary Center] *[http://www.lib.unc.edu/rbc/percy/ Walker Percy: From Pen to Print], a 2002 exhibit at the Rare Book Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill. {{Persondata |NAME=Percy, Walker |SHORT DESCRIPTION=Southern philosophical novelist |DATE OF BIRTH=[[May 28]], [[1916]] |PLACE OF BIRTH=[[Birmingham]], [[Alabama]], [[United States of America]] |DATE OF DEATH=[[May 10]], [[1990]] |PLACE OF DEATH=[[Covington]], [[Louisiana]], [[United States of America]] }} {{DEFAULTSORT:Percy, Walker}} [[Category:1916 births]] [[Category:1990 deaths]] [[Category:American novelists]] [[Category:Columbia Medical School alumni]] [[Category:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni]] [[Category:Louisiana writers]] [[Category:National Book Award winners]] [[Category:Louisiana State University faculty]] [[Category:Prostate cancer deaths]] [[Category:People from Louisiana]] [[Category:People from Birmingham, Alabama]] [[Category:Protestant converts to Catholicism]] [[Category:Former Protestants]] [[Category:American Roman Catholics]] [[Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism]] [[Category:Roman Catholic writers]] [[de:Walker Percy]] [[es:Walker Percy]] [[hi:वाकर पर्सी]] [[nl:Walker Percy]] [[pl:Walker Percy]] [[simple:Walker Percy]] [[sr:Вокер Перси]]