Walker Percy

American · 1916 to 1990

Born Walker Percy on May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama, the eldest of three sons of a Mississippi lawyer named LeRoy Pratt Percy, he watched his family's history unravel from the inside. His grandfather killed himself in 1917; his father killed himself in 1929 with a twelve-gauge shotgun in the attic when Percy was thirteen; his mother drove off a country bridge into Deer Creek two years later, a death he always counted a third suicide. He and his brothers were taken in by their cousin William Alexander Percy, the bachelor lawyer-poet of Greenville, Mississippi, whose household introduced the boy to Faulkner, Keats, and the long Stoic afterlife of the southern aristocracy. He took a degree from the University of North Carolina, an M.D. from Columbia in 1941 with the intent of becoming a psychiatrist, and contracted tuberculosis while performing an autopsy at Bellevue. The two-year cure at Saranac Lake gave him Kierkegaard, Marcel, Heidegger, and Dostoevsky, and ended his medical career. He converted to Catholicism in 1947, married Mary Bernice Townsend, settled in Covington, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, and lived on a small inherited income for the rest of his life. The Moviegoer (1961), the first-person record of a New Orleans stockbroker named Binx Bolling adrift in what he calls the everydayness, won the National Book Award after being plucked from oblivion by Jean Stafford. He published five more philosophical novels and several essays in semiotics. He died of prostate cancer at his Covington home on May 10, 1990, at seventy-three, eighteen days short of seventy-four.