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.

Author: Eudora Welty
My favorite short story of her: Why I Live at the P.O.

Please keep us updated!

Fiction? One of them is Crime and Punishment.

For those who liked the Da Vinci Code you might want to try Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

Here is one reader's review of it as posted on amazon.com

This book has it all! Mystery, thriller, suspense, world history, masons, world conspiracy, voodoo, magic, computers trying to reproduce the true name of God, jewish mysticism , druids of the forests, underground tunels that connect strategic points of the planet, publishers and writers, knights of the temple, action all around the world through the past 2 milenia. YOU NAME IT. Centuries of conspiracy and battle for the domination of the world , unspeakable secrets passed upon generation to generation from a few chosen ones, build up until the last climactic pages of the book.
ADVICE:

The book is really worth for its money and it will keep you awake for a few days. You will refuse to close the book until you reach the end. In the beginning you will not understand a thing, what is going on, who are these people, what are they trying to do. Never mind, just carry on. Eco meant the book to be this way! Enjoy the book and if you dont understand some historical remarks never mind, just continue, dont stumble upon the little details and the dates, get the big picture. You will have plenty of time to think about it after you have finished but the main thing is to go entirely through the book and finish it. It will leave you with your mouth open. Dont let yourself think :I cant understand this, I am an idiot therefore I will not continue. No, just finish the book , at the end you will be rewarded as is the case with all of Ecos books. After all there is no such thing as "I dont understand the book", there is only "I didnt let myself free enough to understand it".

Eco writes his books this way, they are only meant for the strong of spirit, people with perseverance that are willing to strugle in order to reach the ultimate truth that only the very few have mastered. His novels are deliberately cryptic but only to the point that they discourage the faint of hurt. For the few strong men that are willing to engage into the battle, all the mysteries and the hypes reveil themselfs at the end,like the petals of a rose in the spring. This is the REWARD, something central on Eco's novels.

IN ORDER TO PROVE MY POINT ECO HIMSELF ADMITTED that he included the first hundred pages of pure history in the "Name of the Rose" just to discourage the readers that would not have the strenght to continue with the book. That was the PRICE! that the readers have to pay in order to reach the monastery up in the mountains that the story takes place. His editor suggested that he should completely remove this big part of the book but Eco denied!

Going back to the PENDULUM, You should never forget that this book is a really mystery book. Not only for the heros of the book but also for you , the reader. There were times that I felt that I was involved in this world conspiracy and I may be in danger like the hero of the book. That is the trully amazing element of Eco. It gets the reader involved. And at the end you will have a completely different point of view about the world.

Eco has said that the ultimate mystery book is the one that the READER is himself the killer!

I definetely recommend the book, it will not dissapoint you.

Enjoy!

Crime and Punishment

The Tempest--drama

The Stranger

The Plague

Silence is the voice of complicity. Source ??

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time. --T.S.Eliot

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. --Oscar Wilde

Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. --William Butler Yeats

Patricia Cornwell-yeah, especially the Kate Scarpetta series

Walker Percy
Love in the Ruins
The Moviegoer
Lancelot