Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990), Southern author, born in Birmingham, Alabama. During his high school years, his father committed suicide and his mother died in a car crash, after which he and his two younger brothers moved to Greenville, Mississippi, where his cousin William Alexander Percy, lawyer, poet, and autobiographer, became their guardian and adopted them. “Uncle Will” introduced Walker to many writers and poets and to a neighboring boy his own age – Shelby Foote, who became Walker’s life-long best friend.

Percy attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and trained as a medical doctor at Columbia, receiving his medical degree in 1941. After contracting TB while interning at Bellevue, he was psychoanalyzed by a protégé of Henry Stack Sullivan. He married Mary Bernice Townsend on November 7, 1946, and they raised their two daughters in Covington, Louisiana. Although a prolific existentialist and essayist, Percy, a Catholic convert, is best known for his "philosophical novels", the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. Allen Tate’s wife, the poet Caroline Gordon, like Walker a Catholic convert, had helped him improve his style. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Humanities chose him as Jefferson Lecturer, for which he read, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind.”

He died of prostate cancer in 1990 at 72.

As young men, Walker and Shelby decided to pay their respects to William Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi. However, when they finally drove up to his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to talk to him. Later on, he recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch.

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 tragic suicide.

Partial bibliography

Novels
The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961, reprinted, Avon, 1980.
The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966; reprinted, Avon, 1978.
Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971; reprinted, Avon, 1978.
Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977.
The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980.
The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.