Novelist Walker Percy Dies; Examined Christian Concerns

Walker Percy, the late-blooming novelist who wrote in the manner of European existentialists yet whose fictional milieus were distinctly American, died of cancer Thursday at his home in Covington, La.

The Associated Press said he was 74 when he died at his home on the banks of the Bogue Falaya River, across Lake Pontchatrain from New Orleans.

Percy, who spent the last 30 years of his life writing of mankind’s despair in the 20th Century, has--since the publication of his first novel, “The Moviegoer,” in 1961 when he was 45--consistently been praised for his examination of Christian concerns in a world of self-alienation.

“Percy’s hunt for contemporary pain,” wrote Los Angeles Times critic Richard Eder, “led him to the mind. Our dramas may play out in our affections, our sex lives, our politics and in the exercise and adornment of our egos. But their roots are in our metaphysics.”

Tributes followed his death by only hours.

In Jackson, Miss., author Eudora Welty said, “I’m very grieved and very, very hurt for all his family. His friendship meant a lot to me and his work meant a great deal to me, too.”

Times book editor Jack Miles called Percy a “critic and philosopher of language as well as a novelist, a scientist and a humanist.

“Like Flannery O’Connor he was a Catholic in the Protestant rural South. In novels like the incomparable ‘Love in the Ruins’ and ‘The Second Coming’ and in book-length essays like ‘Lost in the Cosmos,’ he was, in person, the refutation of any claim that American literature lacks intellectual rigor or speculative depth.”

After “Moviegoer,” Percy’s novels included “The Last Gentleman” (1966), “Love in the Ruins” (1971), “Lancelot” (1977), “The Second Coming” (1980), and “The Thanatos Syndrome” (1987).

His many honors included the National Book Award in 1962 for “Moviegoer,” even though its publisher had not particularly promoted it. He also was the only author to win two Los Angeles Times Book prizes, in 1980 for “The Second Coming” and in 1983 for the nonfiction “Lost in the Cosmos.”

Critic Alfred Kazin once called Percy “the satiric Dostoyevsky of the bayou.”

But Percy said he was influenced more by the European existentialists, especially the Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, than by fellow Southerners. He promoted “Lost in the Cosmos” as “the last self-help book” and set out to “explain why it is that man is the only alien creature, as far as we know, in the entire planet.”

His other major piece of nonfiction was “The Message in the Bottle” (1975), essays on the philosophy of language.

Although he did not find success as a novelist until middle age, he had been writing short stories and sonnets since elementary school, even selling some of them to fellow students at 50 cents each.

He was born in Birmingham, Ala., to successful parents but was only 11 when his lawyer father killed himself. Two years later his mother died in a car crash and he and two brothers went to Greenville, Miss., to live with “Uncle Will,” his father’s cousin.

“Uncle Will,” William Alexander Percy, had written of the Old South--most particularly “Lanterns on the Levee”--and presided over a household of Southern intellectuals and artists.

Young Percy wrote years later that he was “the most extraordinary man I have ever known.”

Despite his literary interests, Percy decided to pursue a career in science. He graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in chemistry and earned a medical degree at Columbia University in 1941.

Working as a pathologist at Bellevue in New York City, he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis after performing autopsies on derelicts and was forced to spend two years in a sanitarium.

He read voraciously and upon his discharge opted for a literary life, made possible by an inheritance.

“If the first great intellectual discovery of my life was the beauty of the scientific method,” he wrote years later, “surely the second was the discovery of the singular predicament of man in the very world which has been transformed by this science. . . . The more science progressed and even as it benefited man, the less it said about what it is is like to be a man living in the world. . . . “

On a lighter note he allowed: “I’ve often said that getting a light case of TB was the best thing that could’ve happened to me.”

Between his recovery and the publication of “Moviegoer,” he moved to New Orleans, married, converted to Roman Catholicism and raised two daughters.

He also wrote two unsuccessful novels and articles on language and psychiatry (he had undergone psychoanalysis as a medical student.)

He insisted he was not a Catholic writer but said that his writing was formed by the Judeo-Christian view of man.

Newsweek magagazine several years ago said that “Walker Percy is a Christian novelist. Which is not to say that he’s a Christian who writes novels--there’s no shortage of those--but that he’s a novelist who writes about Christian concerns.”