Walker Percy (Magill’s Literary Annual 1998)
At a glance:
- Author: Patrick H. Samway
- First Published: 1997
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1916-1990
- Setting: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and New York
- Principal Characters: Walker Percy, Mary “Bunt” Percy, Shelby Foote, Will Percy
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: South or Southerners, Alienation, Doctors, Novelists, Cancer, Depression, mental, Catholics or Catholic Church, Tuberculosis, Semiotics
- Locales: New York, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama
Since Walker Percy’s death from cancer in 1990, the critical industry surrounding his work has gained momentum. Patrick Samway’s biography of Percy comes second after Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (1992) by Jay Tolson, which received favorable reviews and the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction in 1993. Since Samway has been working on his biography since 1987, one can only speculate on how this competing biography affected his work in progress. While Tolson dramatizes Percy’s struggle to transform himself from a practicing doctor into a successful writer,...
[The entire page is 2074 words long]
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