Walker Percy

The Last Gentleman is a 1966 novel by Walker Percy. The narrative centers on the character of Williston Bibb Barret, a man born in the Mississippi Delta who has moved to New York City, where he lives at a YMCA and works as a night janitor. Will suffers from a "nervous condition," which causes him to experience fits of …

The Thanatos Syndrome was Walker Percy's last novel. It is a sequel to Love in the Ruins. It tells the story of a former psychiatrist who suspects that something or someone is making everyone in the town crazy and they turn to zombies. In 1989, Percy stated that, in The Thanatos Syndrome: "I tried to show how, while …

The Second Coming is a novel by Walker Percy. It is a sequel to The Last Gentleman. It tells the story of middle-aged Will Barrett and his relationship with Allison, a young woman who has escaped from a mental hospital. The book was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980. The novel spends much of …

This elegantly written account of a young man's search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but …

The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other is a collection of essays on semiotics written by Walker Percy and first published in 1975. Percy writes at what he sees as the conclusion of the modern age and attempts to create a middle ground between the two …

Love in the Ruins is a novel of speculative or science fiction by author Walker Percy from 1971. It follows its main character, Dr Thomas More, namesake and descendant of Sir Thomas More, a psychiatrist in a small town in Louisiana called Paradise. Over time, the US has become progressively more fragmented, between …

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book is a mock self-help book and social satire on the American value of autonomy by Walker Percy. It was published in 1983 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Organized into roughly four sections that explore ideas of the self, Percy's thesis is that the social ills which plague …