continued to reap critical plaudits for his fiction, his nonfiction essays were collected and published inThe Message in the Bottle in 1975, astonishing his readers with their variety and their expertise in arcane linguistic and psychological theory. Percy’s fourth novel, the dark, disturbing Lancelot (1977), is the story of a vengeful husband who murders his wife and her lover.

Attempting to write his first “nonalienated,” or optimistic, novel, Percy revived the character of Will Barrett for his 1980 book, The Second Coming. The now widowed Barrett finds true love—and God—in a densely plotted, comic work that revealed a new emphasis of affirmation in Percy that earned him back the critical respect he seemed to have lost with Lancelot. Percy’s publisher rewarded the critical and financial success of The Second Coming by bringing out Percy’s quirky nonfiction book, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, in 1983. Lost in the Cosmos was at once a satire of television talk-show hosts, a serious monograph on language and semiotics, and a brief for Christianity—delighting some critics and readers and confusing others.

In 1987, Percy published what many regard as his greatest achievement, The Thanatos Syndrome, This novel also revives a past Percy character, Dr. Tom More. Fresh from a prison sentence for selling drugs to truck drivers, More discovers and thwarts a fiendish plot—engineered by a coterie of prominent and respectable lawyers and doctors—to anesthetize the populace by drugging the drinking water of Feliciana Parish in Louisiana.

Percy died on May 10, 1990, after a battle with cancer. He will long be remembered for his poignant warnings against a potential holocaust in Western culture because of its creeping acceptance of situational ethics at the expense of an eternal moral standard.

Percy once commented that his major novelistic concern was to depict “what it means to be a man living in the world who must die.” In his work, the modern South—the last authentic refuge of American religious faith—is the typical setting for protagonists beset by alienation and the conflicting demands of community and tradition in a hostile modernity. Only a recognition of a transcendent order may provide the basis for recovery of self and a unified vision of the world.

At the center of this recovery, Percy places the mystery of humankind’s origin and the clues provided by language in solving it—specifically, the human ability to make symbol and metaphor. What separates Percy from other, more pretentious writers of philosophical fiction is his keen sense of everydayness, the vivid capturing of the details of modern life.

Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 28, 1916. When his father, lawyer Leroy Percy, committed suicide in 1929, the young Percy, his two brothers, and their mother moved to Greenville, Mississippi, where they lived with Leroy’s bachelor cousin, William Alexander Percy. William adopted the boys in 1931, following their mother’s death in an automobile accident. The Greenville home served as something of a local cultural center; the uncle, the author of several works, including an autobiographical memoir of the South titled Lanterns on the Levee (1941), entertained such house guests as William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, David Cohn, and Harry Stack Sullivan.

In the early 1930’s, Percy attended Greenville High School, where he wrote a gossip column and became the close friend of Shelby Foote, who was by then already committed to a literary career. At the University of North Carolina, which was noted for its school of behaviorism, Percy majored in chemistry and received a bachelor of science degree in 1937. He then enrolled in Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and received his medical degree in 1941. In addition to his studies, Percy underwent psychoanalysis and became a frequent filmgoer. The turning point in his life came in early 1942 when, as a medical resident at Bellevue Hospital in New York, Percy contracted tuberculosis. During his two-year convalescence at Saranac Lake, he began reading extensively in philosophy and literature (Sartre, Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Fyodor Dostoevski, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka). What he discovered was that as a medical doctor he knew much about people but had no idea how to define a human.

Following a relapse and further convalescence in 1944, Percy seemed sure of only two things: He was a doctor who did not wish to practice medicine; he was literally as well as existentially homeless (his uncle having died in 1942). In 1945, he traveled with Foote to New Mexico and then stayed on alone for a time. On November 7, 1946, he married Mary Bernice Townsend, and less than a year later they both converted to Catholicism. (The decision to convert was, Percy said, in large measure the result of their reading of Kierkegaard’s essay, “The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle.”) Soon after, the Percys moved from Sewanee, Tennessee, to New Orleans, Louisiana, where Percy continued his contemplative life. Financially secure—thanks to his uncle’s estate—and intellectually rich, his landlord, Julius Friend, a professor of philosophy, introduced him to the writings of Charles Saunders Peirce, whose triadic theory of language formed the basis of Percy’s own linguistic speculations. (Percy’s interest in language had another and more personal source: The younger of his two daughters was born deaf.) In 1950, the Percys moved to Covington, Louisiana, “a pleasant non-place,” Percy said, where it is possible to live as a stranger in one’s own land; it is neither the “anyplace” that characterizes mass society nor the “someplace” of New Orleans or a Richmond, where the past haunts the present.

In the 1950’s, Percy began publishing essays in such journals as Thought, Commonweal, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. After discarding two early novels, he began writing The Moviegoer in 1959, revising it four times before its publication two years later. Until his death on May 10, 1990, Percy lived quietly in Covington, a serious and meditative novelist pondering the world in thought, fiction, and an occasional essay.

Walker Percy began to write fiction in his middle years. Originally trained as a doctor, he contracted tuberculosis while doing residency work. While recovering over the course of several years, he began to read widely in philosophy, linguistics, and fiction. Becoming a Catholic in 1947 along with his wife, Percy began writing sophisticated essays on language acquisition and use and on how purely scientific explanations of human behavior and culture making were insufficient to explain the mysteries of being human. Feeling that scholarly articles and book reviews did not adequately express his thoughts, Percy turned to fiction.

His first novel, The Moviegoer, explores such themes as the search for meaning, life in the South, and the uniqueness of human communication. The novel is humorous and philosophical, and it established the direction of Percy’s life. It also won the National Book Award for fiction, although it did not interest many readers when first published.

Although Percy was a Catholic writer, his works are not simple, uplifting stories of a faith that conquers all. His main characters almost always suffer from a variety of mental and physical problems, and belief in Christianity is often far away from them. Their moods are often more depressed than edified.

Percy’s primary characters are almost always male, and they have been raised in upper-class Southern backgrounds, reflecting Percy’s own upbringing. In them and in a variety of other characters, such as African Americans, doctors, and poor whites, Percy wonderfully captures the ambience of a South in transition.

A central concern in all the novels is the mystery of human communication. Percy had early imbibed the scientific-humanistic perspective on communication through studying medicine, but while convalescing in a sanatorium he began to read deeply in existentialism, theology, and modern fiction. These influences recur through each novel. The protagonist is always on a quest for meaning, and it is never certain whether he will find it in the gentrified society in which he lives.

Percy’s father killed himself in 1929. Percy’s mother died several years after in an accident. The trauma, especially of his father’s death, crops up frequently in novels. Self-annihilation becomes one possible response for several of the main characters, showing clearly how religion was, for Percy, not an easy answer for one’s confusion about the purposes of life and love.