The Last Gentleman (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Walker Percy
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: 1960’s, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Suicide, South or Southerners, New York City, Religion, Death or dying, Southwest, Terminal illness or terminally ill
- Locales: New York, NY, South (U.S.), Southwest (U.S.)
The Last Gentleman is Percy's most ambitious and overtly philosophical novel, one whose “ideas” take precedence over character, plot, or theme. It is as if Percy's long years of cogitation about language, humankind, and the cosmos and the alienation evident in American culture suddenly coalesced and compelled him to write a series of interesting, though convoluted, monologues to be placed in the mouths of the brooding searchers populating his narrative. Here the reader finds a compendium of Percy's personal indictments against crass “Christian America,” modeled on the...
[The entire page is 1352 words long]
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