Walker Percy

Walker Percy, OblSB (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American writer whose works explored alienation, existentialism, faith, and the limits of science in modern life. A prominent Southern and Catholic literary figure, Percy is especially noted for his novels set in New Orleans. His first, The Moviegoer (1961), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Both of Percy's parents died in likely suicides, and he was raised by his lawyer and poet cousin William Alexander Percy in Mississippi. Percy studied chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received an M.D. from Columbia University in 1941, intending to become a psychiatrist. However, Percy contracted tuberculosis while interning at Bellevue Hospital in 1942 and spent years at sanatoriums like the Trudeau Sanatorium. During his convalescence, Percy read the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Jean-Paul Sartre and started to question science's ability to explain human existence. He began attending daily Mass and converted to Catholicism in 1947. Percy's literary career was launched with a 1956 essay attacking segregation, published in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. His debut novel The Moviegoer was followed by The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). He also wrote nonfiction on semiotics and existentialism, including The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos (1983). Percy spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana and had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote. Percy also taught at Loyola University New Orleans and was instrumental in the 1980 publication of A Confederacy of Dunces, a decade after the suicide of its author John Kennedy Toole. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker died of prostate cancer in 1990, shortly after becoming a Benedictine oblate.