Walker Percy
| Walker Percy | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 28, 1916 Birmingham, Alabama |
| Died | May 10, 1990 (aged 73) Covington, Louisiana |
| Occupation | Author |
| Period | 1961–1990 |
| Genre | Philosophical novelist, Memoir, Essays |
| Literary movement | Southern |
| Spouse | Mary Bernice Townsend |
Walker Percy, Obl.S.B. (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American author from Covington, Louisiana, whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith.
Percy was born in 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, as the first of three boys to LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan Phinizy. His father's Mississippi Protestant family included his great-uncle LeRoy Percy, a U.S. Senator, and LeRoy Pope Percy, a Civil War hero. In February 1917, Percy's grandfather committed suicide. This seemed to set a family pattern of emotional struggle and deaths that would haunt Percy throughout his life.
In 1929, when Percy was 13, his father committed suicide. His mother took the family to live at her own mother's home in Athens, Georgia. Two years later, Percy's mother died when she drove a car off a country bridge and into Deer Creek near Leland, Mississippi, where they were visiting. Percy regarded this death as another suicide. 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 in Greenville, Mississippi.
Percy was raised as an agnostic, though he was nominally affiliated with a theologically liberal Presbyterian church. William Percy introduced him to many writers and poets, and to a neighboring youth his own age, Shelby Foote, who became his lifelong best friend.
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