Walker Percy Novels

About Walker Percy

Walker Percy (1916–1990) was a Louisiana Catholic philosopher-novelist who came to fiction after a tuberculosis diagnosis gave him years for reading Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and the existentialists, and who brought their preoccupations — alienation, the search for authentic existence, the malaise of ordinary comfortable life — into a distinctly Southern American register. The Moviegoer (1961) won the National Book Award and established his voice: Binx Bolling in New Orleans, searching for something he cannot name. The Last Gentleman (1966) followed Will Barrett through New York and the South; Love in the Ruins (1971) took the satirical mode to a near-future collapsed America; Lancelot (1977) was his darkest and most controversial; The Second Coming (1980) returned Will Barrett in old age. The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) was his final novel. Percy also wrote two books of philosophical essays — The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos (1983) — that illuminate his fiction's concerns.