Title: Pilgrim in the ruins : a life of Walker Percy /
Authors: Tolson, Jay.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster,
Year: 1992
Subjects: Percy, Walker, Biography.; Percy, Walker,; Novelists, American Biography; Philosophers United States Biography; Physicians United States Biography
Abstract: When The Moviegoer, an extraordinary first novel by an unknown Louisiana author, won the National Book Award in 1962, it marked the arrival of an exceptional literary talent. With his five successive novels and his wide-ranging philosophical and occasional essays, Walker Percy shored up his reputation as one of America's greatest writers - an ironic moralist and perhaps the shrewdest chronicler of life in the New South. Yet even by the time of his death in 1990, little was known about this intensely private man. Based on extensive interviews, written with access to Percy's letters and manuscripts, Jay Tolson has fashioned the first major biography of the writer, an authoritative portrait that brings Percy alive as it illuminates his distinguished body of work. We see Percy's life and his brilliant career against the background of the American South, whose colorful and tragic history is rooted deeply in the hearts and minds of its most talented sons and daughters.^
Contents: Magic city -- From New South to Old -- Uncle Will -- Greenville days -- Chapel Hill -- The healer's art -- The shadow of death -- Drift and resolution -- A second apprenticeship -- The consolations of philosophy -- Carnival in gentilly -- Peregrinations -- Apocalyptic mirth -- The third half of life -- The knight, death, and the devil -- Second sightings -- Thanatos and after.