Walker Percy’s literary vision was devoted to the exploration of “the dislocation of man in the modern age,” and his novels exhibit combinations of existentialism, Southern sentimentality, and a deeply felt Catholicism. He was born on May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Ala.,, but his family came from a distinguished Mississippi lineage of Civil War heroes and politicians. His early life was colored by tragedies and emotional struggles that haunted him throughout his life. His grandfather had killed himself with a shotgun before he was born, and his father committed suicide with a shotgun when Percy was 13. Two years later, his mother died after she drove an automobile off a bridge into a bayou, a bizarre accident he was convinced was also a suicide. Orphaned and alone, Percy and his two brothers, LeRoy and Phin, moved to Greenville, Miss., where they lived and were later adopted by their eclectic bachelor uncle, William Alexander Percy.

Living with “Uncle Will” in Greenville was never a dull time. He was a lawyer by trade and everything else by choice: a cotton planter, a poet, philosopher and politician. He was part Southern romantic, part chivalric knight, and always the gracious Southern gentleman. William Alexander Percy had a stable of creative friends who frequently visited, people like Sherwood Anderson and Langston Hughes. There were poets, musicians, writers, philosophers, artists, all of whom intellectually stimulated the impressionable young Walker. One such visitor was a young neighbor boy named Shelby Foote, who not only became Percy’s friend, but became a stabilizing force in Percy’s life as well as his closest and most enduring friend.

Percy and Foote attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill together. In 1934, Percy bade his friend farewell and moved to New York City to attend medical school at Columbia University, where he received his medical degree in 1941. On a brief summer visit back to Mississippi in 1938, Percy talked Foote into riding with him up to Oxford, Miss., to pay a cordial visit on William Faulkner. Percy was so intimidated by the literary giant, he could not bring himself to actually talk to him. Years later, he recounted how he sat in the car and watched from a distance as Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch. Foote was forever indebted to Percy for the experience, as it became the singular inspiration that led him to become a novelist.

In 1942, while working as a pathologist, Percy contracted tuberculosis. During a painful three year convalescence, he began to read the writings of Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard, Russian novelist Dostoevsky, and he explored more humanistic interests that eluded him during his medical training. He lost his faith in medical science as a reliable means of explaining the mysteries of existence, and in 1947, Percy converted to Catholicism, and decided to become a full-time writer instead of a medical doctor, preferring to study, as he would later say, the “pathology of the soul” rather than of the body.

He published his first major work in 1961, The Moviegoer, about a young man from an old cultivated Southern family who had all the advantages modern America had to offer, but who felt alienated from both the old South and the new America. His subsequent works included The Last Gentleman (1966), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). Over 60 now, he returned to write more works reflecting his earlier interests in existentialism and spirituality. In 1987, Percy joined Shelby Foote, Eudora Welty and 18 other noted Southern authors in Chattanooga, Tenn., to form the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Two years later, the National Endowment for the Humanities chose him winner of the 1989 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

Percy was married to the former Mary Bernice Townsend, a medical technician, and they had two daughters. He died in Covington, La., of prostate cancer on May 10, 1990, only 18 days before his 74th birthday.

by Stephen Enzweiler

Tennessee Williams	Ellen Gilchrist	John Grisham	Margaret Walker Alexander
Clifton Taulbert	Eudora Welty	Richard Wright	Shelby Foote
Jimmy Buffett	Greg Iles	William Faulkner	Jill Conner Browne
	Walker Percy	Willie Morris