Walker Percy - Biography, Further reading

Writer, born in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. After the suicide of his father (1929) and death of his mother (1931), he and his two brothers were adopted by their father's cousin, William Percy, who lived in Greenville, MS. Walker studied at the University of North Carolina (1937 BA) and Columbia University (1941 MD), and then worked as a pathologist in New York City, but he contracted tuberculosis and spent three years in a sanatorium. He returned to Columbia to teach pathology (1944), suffered a relapse, and left medicine and New York City. He married (1946), converted to Catholicism (1947), and settled in Covington, LA to write. Starting with his first and best-known work, The Moviegoer (1961), he published several novels characterized by his conservative disillusionment with contemporary American life and values. A philosophical-intellectual man, he collected his essays on language in The Message in the Bottle (1975).

Walker Percy

Born	May 28, 1916 Birmingham, Alabama, United States of America
Died	May 10, 1990, age 73 Covington, Louisiana, United States of America Prostate cancer
Occupation	Author
Religion	Catholic
Spouse	Mary Bernice Townsend

Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics.

Biography

Early life

Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, into a distinguished Mississippi Protestant family whose past illuminaries had included congressmen and Civil War heroes. Prior to Percy's birth, his grandfather had killed himself with a shotgun, setting a pattern of emotional struggle and tragic death that would haunt Percy throughout his life.

In 1929, Percy's father used a shotgun to commit suicide. The Percy family then moved to Athens, Georgia where two years later, his mother died in a car crash when she drove off a country bridge and into a bayou—an accident that Percy regarded as another suicide.

Percy joined Foote at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then trained as a medical doctor at Columbia University in New York City, receiving his medical degree in 1941. After contracting TB from performing an autopsy while interning at Bellevue, Percy spent the next several years recuperating at the Trudeau Sanitorium in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

Literary career

In 1961, Percy published his first novel, The Moviegoer, after many years of work and rewriting in collaboration with editor, Stanley Kauffman. 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."

Percy was instrumental in getting John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces published in 1980, over a decade after Toole's suicide.

The National Endowment for the Humanities chose him as the winner for the 1989 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, for which he read, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind.”

Death and afterward

Walker Percy died of prostate cancer in 1990 just eighteen days before his 74th birthday.

Percy Writers

Sarah Dorsey Kate Ferguson Eleanor Percy Lee William Armstrong Percy, III Catherine Anne Warfield

Other Percys

LeRoy Percy Thomas George Percy

Persondata
NAME	Percy, Walker
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Southern philosophical novelist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 28, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH	Birmingham, Alabama, United States of America
DATE OF DEATH	May 10, 1990
PLACE OF DEATH	Covington, Louisiana, United States of America