|
The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961, reprinted, Avon, 1980.
The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.
Book Reviews |
|
The Last Gentlemen. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966; reprinted, Avon, 1978.
Will Barrett is a 25-year-old wanderer from the South living in New York City, detached from his roots and with no plans for the future, until the purchase of a telescope sets off a romance and changes his life forever.
|
|
Love In The Ruins. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971; reprinted, Avon, 1978.
Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.
Book Reviews |
|
Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977.
Lancelot Lamar is a disenchanted lawyer who finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don't seem worth remembering. It all began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter, a discovery which sent Lancelot on modern quest to reverse the degeneration of America. Percy's novel reveals a shining knight for the modern age--a knight not of romance, but of revenge.
Book Reviews
|
|
The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980.
Will Barrett (also the hero of Percy's The Last Gentleman) is a lonely widower suffering from a depression so severe that he decides he doesn't want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself in a greenhouse. The Second Coming is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will sets out in search of God's existence and winds up finding much more.
|
|
The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.
Returning home to the small Louisiana parish where he had praticed psychiatry, Dr. Tom More quickly notices something strange occuring with the townfolk, a loss of inhibitions. Behind this mystery is a dangerous plot drug the local water supply, and a discovery that takes More into the underside of the American search for happiness.
|
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.
In Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy offers insights on such varied yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, Helen Keller, Semioticism, and the incredible Delta Factor. Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us.
|
|
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1983.
Walker Percy's mordantly funny and wholly original contribution to the self-help book craze deals with the Western mind's tendency toward heavy abstraction. This favorite of Percy fans continues to charm and beguile readers of all tastes and backgrounds. Lost in the Cosmos invites us to think about how we communicate with our world.
|
|
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
|
|
Signposts In a Strange Land. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1991.
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.
|
|
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. |