Walker Percy

Walker Percy (1916–1990) was an American novelist and essayist whose works combined philosophy, semiotics, and Catholic thought. He wrote fiction set mainly in the American South and is best known for The Moviegoer (1961), which won the National Book Award. He later received the St. Louis Literary Award (1985) and the Laetare Medal (1989).

Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama. His childhood was marked by tragedy, as both his father and grandfather died by suicide, followed by the death of his mother when he was fifteen.

He and his brothers were taken in by their cousin William Alexander Percy, a lawyer and poet in Greenville, Mississippi. Life in his uncle’s home exposed him to literature and poetry, though he was also raised in an atmosphere of stoic honour that he later resisted.

Percy attended Greenville High School and then the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in chemistry and graduated in 1937.

Walker continued his education at Columbia University, earning a medical degree in 1941, and subsequently became a psychiatrist. While working as an intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York in 1942, Percy contracted tuberculosis during an autopsy.

He spent several years in sanatoriums recovering from the disease. This enforced rest gave him time to read widely, including works by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and other existential thinkers.

Percy later remarked, “I was the happiest man ever to contract tuberculosis, because it enabled me to get out of Bellevue and quit medicine.”

In 1946, he married Mary Bernice Townsend, and the couple entered the Catholic Church the following year. They eventually settled in Covington, Louisiana, where they raised two daughters. Percy turned to writing full-time in the late 1940s, producing early unpublished novels before publishing essays. His 1956 essay Stoicism in the South condemned segregation and called for a Christian response to racial injustice.

Percy’s breakthrough came with The Moviegoer (1961). Its protagonist, Binx Bolling, embodied the “modern malaise” that Percy saw in post-war American life. The novel’s reception brought him national recognition and the National Book Award.

He followed with The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). His fiction often portrayed characters searching for meaning in an age dominated by science and technology, often in an alienated state.

Alongside his novels, Percy wrote essential essays on language and philosophy. The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos (1983) explored the nature of human communication through semiotics. He described the triadic relation of language as “irreducible,” contrasting it with the dyadic stimulus-response model of science.

Walker Percy became a noted Catholic moral voice, addressing issues such as abortion, despair, and the loss of religious orientation in modern life. His defence of faith and human dignity made him a distinctive figure in American letters. He died of prostate cancer in Covington on 10 May 1990, shortly before his seventy-fourth birthday, and was buried at St Joseph Abbey in Louisiana.