PILGRIM IN THE RUINS. A Life of Walker Percy.

The first major biography of Walker Percy traces his literary career back to his childhood days spent carousing with Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty on his uncle's plantation. 17,500 first printing.

This study of the life and work of Southern author Walker Percy (1916-1990), though competently written and researched, is flawed by Wilson's overt sympathy with Percy's philosophical outlook. The author was burdened by the angst of his father's and grandfather's suicides, and his essays--as well as his skilled and interesting novels, the National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer (1961), Love in the Ruins (1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987)--reflect his quest for moral meaning in life, as Tolson shows. He found this in a conversion to Roman Catholicism, the ideas of the early existentialists and a rejection of modern secularism. Tolson is on firm ground when he details Percy's strong commitment to his wife and children, his friendship with writer Shelby Foote and his struggle to reach a moral position on civil rights, but his evaluation of Percy's work lacks critical distance. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Percy the novelist was arguably the most legitimate apologist for orthodox Christianity in modern letters. A convert to Catholicism, Percy mourned this century's loss of a sense of sin, destroyed by the sensations and temptations offered by the richest country on earth. As a result, he created characters who sought the source of their alienation. Tolson's biography is a skillful synthesis of the trivia of Percy's life, the evolution of his thought, and the substance of his novels. Echoing Percy's belief that history and family history are hopelessly interwoven, Tolson dwells perhaps more than usual on the author's forebears in the South, where they had been prominent for generations. Percy trained as a doctor but contracted tuberculosis while autopsying cadavers at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, which influenced his decision to become a writer. It was his reading of Kierkegaard that alerted him to the useful paradox that true individuality is won only through submission to a higher authority. A substantial biography of a very substantial writer.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.