Walker Percy

Kate's desperate struggle to maintain her sanity forces her cousin Binx to relinquish his dreamworld

The Moviegoer

The last gentleman

A successful man’s midlife crisis may just provide a twisted path to happiness in this New York Times–bestselling novel by the author of The Last Gentleman. Now in his late forties, Will Barrett lives a life other men only dream of. Wealthy from a successful career on Wall Street and from the inheritance of his deceased wife’s estate, Will is universally admired at the club where he spends his days golfing in the North Carolina sun. But everything begins to unravel when, without warning, Will’s golf shots begin landing in the rough, and he is struck with bouts of losing his balance and falling over. Just when Will appears doomed to share the fate of his father—whose suicide has haunted him his whole life—a mental hospital escapee named Allison might prove to be the only one who can save him. Original and profound, The Second Coming is a moving love story of two damaged souls who find peace with each other.

A Novel

The Second Coming

At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.

Essays

Signposts in a Strange Land

This collection of interviews supplements Conversations with Walker Percy and occasions an additional two dozen pleasurable encounters with Percy. Primarily from the last ten years of Percy's life, they show how his presence was stimulating thought in much of humanistic America, in literature, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and in cultural life in general. Although this acclaimed author of The Moviegoer, Lancelot, and Love in the Ruins never overcame his shyness with interviewers, he continued to grant interviews as long as his health permitted. This act of openness illustrates his humility before his ideas and his desire to help others understand them. Although the questions he was asked almost invariably became predictable, he always managed to add an anecdote, an illustration, a topical reference, that would breathe new life into the responses he was making. The interviews in this collection show him at the height when he knew that his illness would not allow him to write any more books, and that the only way to restate his ideas and offer a valediction to the large audience to whom he had always been kind, patient, and appreciative was to speak out. Percy despised the posture of many modern self-proclaimed intellectuals who delight in cloaking ideas in jargon and abstraction. He always tried to express himself clearly and as free of reservations as possible. These interviews reflect that clarity. With this book readers will welcome yet more close encounters with him.

More Conversations with Walker Percy

The Moviegoer ; The Last Gentleman ; The Second Coming

The last Gentleman

In 1 volume, 3 classic early works by the Southern physician-turned-novelist who galvanized American literature with stories of spiritual searching amid modern angst Includes the landmark, National Book Award–winning The Moviegoer, in a fully annotation edition A physician-turned-writer and self-described diagnostician of “the malaise,” Percy plumbed the depths of modern American angst and alienation as few other writers have. Now he joins the Library of America series with a volume collecting his first 3 books. The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction, is the story of John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who finds in movies a resplendent reality that lifts him, for a time, out of the mire of everydayness. Binx is a modern-day pilgrim whose progress unfolds in what editor Paul Elie calls "the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours." In The Last Gentleman (1966), Percy portrays another troubled, searching young man, this time a southerner living in New York whose intermitent amnesia and odd moments of déjà vu lead him to imagine that the world catastrophe everyone fears has already occurred. A satirical work of speculative fiction, Love in the Ruins (1971) introduces lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Thomas More, inventor of the lapsometer, a devise that measures the spiritual sickness of a near-apocalyptic America torn apart by the forces of the far right and left. Rounding out the volume are three short nonfiction pieces by Percy: his speech upon accepting the National Book Award, his special message to readers of the Franklin edition of The Moviegoer, and his address to the Publicists’ Association of the National Book Awards concerning Love in the Ruins.

The Moviegoer / The Last Gentleman / Love in the Ruins

Walker Percy: The Moviegoer & Other Novels 1961-1971 (LOA #380)

The Movie-goer

the adventures of a bad Catholic at a time near the end of the world.

Love in the ruins

The second coming

Lyn Hill

The City of the Dead

Interviews detail Percy's opinions about his work, other writers, influences, the South, style, and fiction technique

Conversations with Walker Percy

These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close-up encounters with one of America's most celebrated writers. These twenty-seven interviews cover a period of twenty-two years, from the time of the publication of Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961, until 1983, when he was interviewed about his friendship with Thomas Merton. This volume is the second in the Literary Conversations series. These unabridged interviews, collected from a variety of sources, will give reading pleasure to general readers who wish to know Percy and his works more closely, and they will be of great use to Percy scholars.

The dazzling novel, written in 1961, that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback edition. "A brilliant novel. . . . . Percy touches the rim of so many human mysteries"--"Harper's".

Walker Percy

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