Walker Percy | |
|---|---|
 Percy in 1987 | |
| Born | (1916-05-28)May 28, 1916 Birmingham,Alabama, U.S. |
| Died | May 10, 1990(1990-05-10) (aged 73) |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Alma mater | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BA) Columbia University (MD) |
| Period | 1961–1990 |
| Genre | Philosophical novelist, memoir, essays |
| Literary movement | Southern Gothic |
| Notable works | The Moviegoer |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Relatives | William Alexander Percy |
Walker Percy,OblSB (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American writer whose interests includedphilosophy andsemiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and aroundNew Orleans; his first,The Moviegoer, won theNational Book Award for Fiction.[1]
Trained as a physician atColumbia University, Percy decided to become a writer after a bout oftuberculosis. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age."[2] His work displays a combination of existential questioning,Southern sensibility, and deepCatholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historianShelby Foote and spent much of his life inCovington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.
Percy was born on May 28, 1916, inBirmingham, Alabama, the first of three boys to LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan Phinizy.[3] His father'sMississippiProtestant family included his great-uncleLeRoy Percy, a US senator, andLeRoy Pope Walker, a pro-slavery secessionist in Antebellum America and the firstConfederate States Secretary of War during theAmerican Civil War.[4] In February 1917, Percy's grandfather died bysuicide.
In 1929, when Percy was 13, his father died by suicide.[3] His mother took the family to live at her own mother's home inAthens, Georgia. Two years later, Percy's mother died in a suspected suicide when she drove a car off a country bridge and intoDeer Creek nearLeland, Mississippi, where they were visiting. Percy regarded this death as another suicide.[5] Walker and his two younger brothers, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin), were taken in by their first cousin once removed,William Alexander Percy, a bachelor lawyer and poet living inGreenville, Mississippi.[6]
Percy was raised as anagnostic, but he was nominally affiliated with a theologically liberalPresbyterian church.[7] William Percy introduced him to many writers and poets.[8]
Percy attendedGreenville High School and theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored inchemistry and joined the Xi chapter ofSigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He wrote essays and book reviews for the school'sCarolina Magazine. He graduated with aB.A. in 1937.[9]
After moving to Greenville, Mississippi, in 1930,Shelby Foote became Percy's lifelong best friend. As young men, Percy and Foote decided to visitWilliam Faulkner inOxford, Mississippi. However, when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak. Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Interview with Foote onThe Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, December 8, 1996,C-SPAN |
Percy and Foote were classmates at both Greenville High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although Foote was not permitted to join Percy's fraternity because of his partly Jewish heritage, he and Percy stayed close friends during their two overlapping years. They went on dates together, made regular trips to nearbyDurham, North Carolina, to drink and socialize, and journeyed toNew York City during one of their semester breaks. When Percy graduated in 1937, Foote dropped out and returned to Greenville.[10]
In the late 1940s, Percy and Foote began a correspondence that lasted until Percy's death in 1990. A collection of their correspondence was published in 1996.[11]
Percy received anM.D. fromColumbia University'sCollege of Physicians and Surgeons inNew York City in 1941, intending to become apsychiatrist.[3] There, he spent five days a week inpsychoanalysis with Janet Rioch, to whom he had been referred byHarry Stack Sullivan, a friend of Uncle Will. After three years, Walker decided to quit the psychoanalysis and later reflected on his treatment as inconclusive.[12] Percy became an intern atBellevue Hospital in Manhattan in 1942 but contractedtuberculosis the same year while he was performing an autopsy at Bellevue.[13] At the time, there was no known treatment for the disease other than rest. While he had only a "minimal lesion"[14] that caused him little pain, he was forced to abandon his medical career and to leave the city. Percy spent several years recuperating at theTrudeau Sanitorium inSaranac Lake, in theAdirondack Mountains ofUpstate New York. He spent his time sleeping, reading, and listening to his radio to hear updates onWorld War II. He was envious of his brothers, who were both enlisted in the war and fighting overseas.[15] During this period, Percy used Trudeau's Mellon Library, which held over 7,000 titles. He read the works of Danishexistentialist philosopherSøren Kierkegaard as well asFyodor Dostoevsky,Gabriel Marcel,Jean-Paul Sartre,Franz Kafka, andThomas Mann. He began to question the ability of science to explain the basic mysteries of human existence. He began to rise daily at dawn to attendMass.[16][17]
In August 1944, Percy was pronounced healthy enough to leave Trudeau and was discharged. He traveled to New York City to seeHuger Jervey, dean ofColumbia Law School and a friend of Percy. He then lived for two months inAtlantic City, New Jersey, with his brother Phin, who was on leave from the Navy.[18] In the spring of 1945, Percy returned to Columbia as an instructor of pathology and took up residence with Huger Jervey. In May, an X-ray revealed a resurgence of thebacillus.[19] Percy consequently traveled toWallingford, Connecticut, to stay at Gaylord Farm Sanatorium.[20][21][17]
Years later, Percy reflected on his illness with more fondness than he had then felt at the time: "I was the happiest man ever to contract tuberculosis, because it enabled me to get out of Bellevue and quit medicine."[22]
In 1935, during the winter term of Percy's sophomore year at Chapel Hill, he contributed four pieces toThe Carolina Magazine. According to scholars such as Jay Tolson, Percy proved his knowledge and interest in the good and the bad that accompany contemporary culture with his first contributions. Percy's personal experiences at Chapel Hill are portrayed in his first novel,The Moviegoer (1961), through the protagonist Binx Bolling. During the years that Percy spent in his fraternity,Sigma Alpha Epsilon, he "became known for his dry wit," which is how Bolling is described by his fraternity brothers inThe Moviegoer.[23][24]
Percy had begun in 1947 or 1948 to write a novel calledThe Charterhouse, which was not published and Percy later destroyed. He worked on a second novel,The Gramercy Winner, which also was never published.[11]
Percy's literary career as a Catholic writer began in 1956 with an essay about race in the Catholic magazineCommonweal.[25] The essay "Stoicism in the South" condemnedSouthern segregation and demanded a larger role for Christian thought in Southern life.[26]
After many years of writing and rewriting in collaboration with editorStanley Kauffmann, Percy published his first novel,The Moviegoer, in 1961. 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."[27]
Later works includedThe Last Gentleman (1966),Love in the Ruins (1971),Lancelot (1977),The Second Coming (1980), andThe Thanatos Syndrome in 1987. Percy's personal life and family legends provided inspiration and played a part in his writing.The Thanatos Syndrome features a story about one of Percy's ancestors that was taken from a family chronicle written by Percy's uncle, Will Percy.[23] Percy's vision for the plot ofThe Second Coming came to him after an old fraternity brother visited him in the 1970s. He told Percy the story of his life where he is burned out and does not know what to do next. The trend of Percy's personal life influencing his writing seemingly held true throughout his literary career, beginning with his first novel.[28] Percy also published a number of nonfiction works exploring his interests insemiotics andexistentialism, his most popular work beingLost in the Cosmos.
In 1975, Percy published a collection of essays,The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. Percy attempted to forge a connection between the idea ofJudeo-Christian ethics and rationalized science and behavioralism. According to scholars such asAnne Berthoff and Linda Whitney Hobson, Percy presented a new way of viewing the struggles of the common man by his specific use of anecdotes and language.[29][28]
Percy taught and mentored younger writers. While teaching atLoyola University of New Orleans, he was instrumental in gettingJohn Kennedy Toole's novelA Confederacy of Dunces published in 1980. That was more than a decade after Toole committed suicide, despondent about being unable to get recognition for his book. Set in New Orleans, it won thePulitzer Prize for Fiction, which was posthumously awarded to Toole.[30]
In 1987, Percy, along with 21 other noted authors, met inChattanooga, Tennessee, to create theFellowship of Southern Writers.
Percy married Mary Bernice Townsend, a medical technician, on November 7, 1946. Both studied Catholicism and were received into theRoman Catholic Church in 1947.[16] Fearing that Percy was sterile, the married couple adopted a first daughter, Mary Pratt, but later conceived a second daughter, Ann, who became deaf at an early age. The family settled inCovington, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Percy's wife and one of their daughters later had a bookstore, where the writer often worked in an office on the second floor.
Percy was strongly anti-abortion. In 1981, he authored aNew York Times opinion article, in which he called abortion a "banal atrocity".[31]
Percy's final novel,The Thanatos Syndrome, condemnseugenics,senicide, and abortion.[32] Percy was a member of the anti-communist organization theInformation Council of the Americas (INCA).[33]
Percy underwent an operation forprostate cancer on March 10, 1988, but it had alreadymetastasized to surrounding tissue andlymph nodes.[34] In July 1989, he volunteered to allow his doctors at theMayo Clinic, inRochester, Minnesota, to use experimental medicines. Percy enrolled in a pilot study to test the effects of the drugsinterferon andfluorouracil in cancer patients. In his correspondence with Foote, Percy expressed frustration over the frequent travel and hospital stays: "Hospitals are no place for anyone, let alone a sick man."[35][36] Although theside effects of the experimental treatment were debilitating, Percy had a revelation when he saw children with cancer waiting in the lounges. He decided to continue the treatment at Mayo as long as he could so that the results of his treatment might be of value to others.[37]
He died of prostate cancer at his home in Covington in 1990, eighteen days before his 74th birthday.[13][38] He is buried on the grounds ofSt. Joseph Benedictine Abbey, inSt. Benedict, Louisiana. He had become a secularoblate of the Abbey's monastic community, making his finaloblation on February 16, 1990, less than three months before his death.[39]
Percy's work, which often features protagonists facing displacement, influenced other Southern authors. According to scholar Farrell O'Gorman, Percy's vision helped bring a fundamental change in southern literature where authors began to use characters concerned with "a sense of estrangement".[40] His writing serves as an example for contemporary southern writers who attempt to combine elements of history, religion, science, and the modern world.[28] Scholars such as Jay Tolson state that Percy's frequent use of characters facing spiritual loneliness in the modern world helped introduce different ways of writing in the south post-war.[23]
In 1962, Percy was awarded theNational Book Award for Fiction for his first novel,The Moviegoer.[41]
In 1985, Percy was awarded theSt. Louis Literary Award from theSaint Louis University Library Associates.[42][43]
In 1989, theUniversity of Notre Dame awarded Percy itsLaetare 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".[44]
Also in 1989, theNational Endowment for the Humanities chose him as the winner for theJefferson Lecture in the Humanities. He read his essay, "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind".[45]
Loyola University New Orleans has multiple archival and manuscript collections related to Percy's life and work.[46]
In 2019, aMississippi Writers Trail historical marker was installed inGreenville, Mississippi, to honor Percy's literary contributions.[47]
Several of the following texts are mere pamphlets, reprinted inSignposts in a Strange Land (ed. Samway).
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