Articles and Commentary on Walker Percy

-- Whither Walker Percy, by Micah Mattix. First Things' "On The Square" May 10, 2010.
-- Walker Percy: Twenty Years Later, by Russell D. Moore. Moore to the Point May 5, 2010.
-- 'Chickens Have No Myths', by Gerald J. Russello. InsideCatholic.com. December 11, 2009.
-- Walker Percy short story discovered Read Street. April 8, 2009.
-- Walker Percy and Suicide, by John F. Desmond (Modern Age 47:1, Winter 2005) - 03/11/09.
-- Walker Percy and Bruce Springsteen Los Angeles Times' "Jacket Copy" January 23, 2009.
-- Walker Percy's Bible Notes and His Fiction: Gracious Obscenity. Renascence, Spring 2007 by Wilson, Franklin Arthur
-- The Needle's Eye: Walker Percy's Conception of Language, Limitation and Sacrament Korrektiv Supplemental [blog] Oct. 18, 2006.
-- Resurrecting the Body: Walker Percy and the Sensuous-Erotic Spirit, by John F. Desmond. Renascence Spring 2006.
-- Traveling with Walker Percy, by Carl Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight. November 2004
-- The Abiding Mystery: A Profile of Walker Percy, by J.B. Cheaney. World and I Feb. 2004. [Subscrition required].
-- Walker Percy: Doctor of the Soul, by Gregory Wolf. Traces March 2004. -- When Catholic giants walked the land: remembering Merton, Day, O'Connor and Percy, by Tim Unsworth. National Catholic Reporter August 1, 2003.
-- Walker Percy: Diagnostician of the Modern Malaise, by Carl E. Olson. CatholicExchange.com (June 19, 2001).
-- Walker Percy and Southern Literature, by Veronica Makowsky. Written for the Walker Percy Project.
-- "That Mysterious Phenomenon": The Affect of Percy's Works upon Readers, by Kenneth Laine Ketner. Given at the Fifth Annual Walker Percy Symposium, April 20, 1996, St. Tammany Parish Public Library.
-- Walker Percy's Homeward Journey, by Patrick H. Samway, S.J. America, Vol. 170, No, 17, May 14, 1994, pp. 16-19.
-- Walker Percy and the Christian Scandal, by Marion Montgomery. First Things 32 (April 1993): 38-44.
-- The Homesick Homeless, by Molly Finn. First Things 33 (May 1993): 46-48. Review of Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy, by Jay Tolson. Simon & Schuster.
-- Walker Percy's Courageous Life, by Amy Welborn. An introduction to various books by Walker Percy.
-- Walker Percy as Satirist: Christian and Humanist Still in Conflict, by Ralph C. Wood. Christian Century November 19, 1980 pp. 1122-1127.
-- Walker Percy and Charles S. Peirce: Abduction and Language, by Jaime Nubiola. University of Navarra, Spain.
-- The World of Walker Percy: A Mythology for Post-Modern Man, by William C. Cozart. Educational Studies: A Jrnl of the American Educ. Studies Assoc. 1981, Vol. 12, No. 2, Pages 163-173.
-- Everynovelness and the Second Coming: Walter Percy's Fiction, by Kent Gramm. Theology Today Vol. 37, January 1981.
-- Walker Percy as Satirist: Christian and Humanist Still in Conflict, by Ralph C. Wood. Christian Century, November 19, 1980
-- Greenville: Walker Percy and Shelby Foote Southern Literary Trail
-- Walker Percy Interviews Bruce Springsteen Doubletake #12.

Websites and Online Resources on Walker Percy

The Walker Percy Project, An Internet Literary Center directed and edited by Henry P. Mills for the University of North Carolina. The mission of the Walker Percy ILC is to provide "comprehensive access to information, resources, and people associated with American novelist and philosopher Walker Percy."
Walker Percy: From Pen to Print. Exhibition at UNC-Chapel Hill. April 17-August 15, 2002.
The Walker Percy Society

Interviews with Walker Percy

Surviving His Own Bad Habits: A previously unpublished interview with Walker Percy, by Robyn Leary. Doubletake Magazine 19, Winter 2000.
The Modern Prognosis: An Interview with Walker Percy. Interview by Brent Short. Washington, DC May, 1989. [Source: The Walker Percy Project].
Walker Percy Interviewed by ZoltÌÁn AbÌÁdi-Nagy The Art of Fiction Issue 103, Summer 1987
The Study of Consciousness: An Interview with Walker Percy (1981), by Linda Whitney Hobson. Conducted on the occasion of Walker Percy's delivery of the Jefferson Lecture of the National Endowment of the Humanities. [reprinted from Conversations with Walker Percy].

By Walker Percy

-- Walker Percy's foreward to A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969).

-- Walker Percy's address on receiving the Laetare Medal at Notre Dame in 1989 [Video @ Youtube.com].

-- Bourbon, Neat Claremont Review of Books Fall 2001.

Books by Walker Percy

The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961, reprinted, Avon, 1980.

Book Reviews

    Review, by Stephen Amidon. New Statesmen Dec. 3, 2001.
    Review, by Peter A. Huff. Cross Currents, åÊWinter, 1998.
The Last Gentlemen. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966; reprinted, Avon, 1978.
Love In The Ruins. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971; reprinted, Avon, 1978.

Book Reviews

Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977.

Book Reviews

The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980.
The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.
Nonfiction by Walker Percy
The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975.
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1983.
Conversations with Walker Percy, edited by VictoråÊA.åÊKramer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.

Excerpts

Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, edited by Walker Percy. Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc, 1998.

Book Reviews

    Review by Ralph C. Wood. Christian Century Nov. 12, 1997.
Signposts In a Strange Land. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1991.
A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner & Walker Percy. University Press of Mississippi, October 1995.
More Conversations with Walker Percy. University Press of Mississippi, June 1993.

Books about Walker Percy




Walker Percy Remembered: A Portrait in the Words of Those Who Knew Him


Walker Percy (1916-1990), the reclusive southern author most famous for his 1961 novel The Moviegoer, spent much of his adult life in Covington, Louisiana. In the spirit of traditional southern storytelling, this biography of Percy takes its shape from candid interviews with his family, close friends, and acquaintances. In thirteen interviews, we get to know Percy through his lifelong friend Shelby Foote, Percy's brothers LeRoy and Phin, his former priest, his housekeeper, and former teachers, among others--all in their own words. Over the course of the interviews, readers learn intimate details of Percy's writing process; his interaction with community members of different ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds; and his commitment to civil rights issues. What emerges is a multidimensional portrait of Percy as a man, a friend, and a family member.



With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: in Company with Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others, by Marion Montgomery. St. Augustines Press (September 2009)



Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction,by Farrell O'Gorman. Louisiana State University Press (October 2007).
In Peculiar Crossroads, Farrell O'Gorman explains how the radical religiosity of both Flannery O'Connor's and Walker Percy's vision made them so valuable as southern fiction writers and social critics. Via their spiritual and philosophical concerns, O'Gorman asserts, these two unabashedly Catholic authors bequeathed a postmodern South of shopping malls and interstates imbued with as much meaning as Appomattox or Yoknapatawpha. O'Gorman builds his argument with biographical, historical, literary, and theological evidence, examining the writers' work through intriguing pairings, such as O'Connor's Wise Blood with Percy's The Moviegoer, and O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find with Percy's Lancelot. An impeccable exercise in literary history and criticism, Peculiar Crossroads renders a genuine understanding of the Catholic sensibility of both O'Connor and Percy and their influence among contemporary southern writers.



Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes: The Search in the Desert, by Allan Pridgen. Susquehanna University Press (November 2000)



The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 5, 2003).
In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."

A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.

Book Reviews

    Writing lives, by Joseph Cunneen. Christian Century, May 31, 2003.



Walker Percy: A Life, by Patrick Samway, SJ. Loyola Press, March 1999.

Book Reviews

    Review by Matthew Carolan. National Review Feb. 9, 1998.
    Review by Peter A. Huff. Cross Currents Winter 1998.
    The Doubtful Pilgrim, by Robert C. Coles. New York Times June 8, 1997.

Excerpts




Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy,
by Jay Tolson. UNC-Chapel Hill Press. February, 1994.

The first major biography of Walker Percy traces his literary career back to his childhood days spent carousing with Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty on his uncle's plantation. 17,500 first printing.
Book Reviews
    The Homesick Homeless, by Molly Finn. First Things 33 (May 1993): 46-48. Review of Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy, by Jay Tolson. Simon & Schuster.

Excerpts

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