Walker Percy

Uncommon card · No. 159314

Walker Percy, OblSB (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American writer whose works explored alienation, existentialism, faith, and the limits of science in modern life. A prominent Southern and Catholic literary figure, Percy is especially noted for his novels set in New Orleans. His first, The Moviegoer (1961), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Both of Percy's parents died in likely suicides, and he was raised by his lawyer and poet cousin William Alexander Percy in Mississippi. Percy studied chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received an M.D. from Columbia University in 1941, intending to become a psychiatrist. However, Percy contracted tuberculosis while interning at Bellevue Hospital in 1942 and spent years at sanatoriums like the Trudeau Sanatorium. During his convalescence, Percy read the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Jean-Paul Sartre and started to question science's ability to explain human existence. He began attending...

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