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According to Sykes, the fiction of Flannery O Connor and Walker Percy provides occasions for divine revelation. He traces their work from its common roots in midcentury southern and Catholic intellectual life to show how the two adopted different theological emphases and rhetorical strategies O Connor building to climactic images, Percy striving for dialogue with the reader as a means of uncovering the sacramental foundation of the created order. Through sustained readings of key texts, Sykes focuses on the intertwined themes of revelation, sacrament, and community. By disclosing how O Connor and Percy made aesthetic choices based on their Catholicism and their belief that fiction by its very nature is revelatory, Sykes demonstrates that their work cannot be seen as merely a continuation of the historical aesthetic that dominated southern literature for so long. ... Read more

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A bibliography of philosopher and author (Love in the Ruins, The Message in the Bottle, etc.), Walker Percy, including information on separate publications, first appearace contributions to books, first appearance contributions to periodicals, interviews and published comments. This is a handy reference for collectors and students of his work. ... Read more

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An authorized biography of the distinguished American author traces the complex events of his life, from his childhood and education to his marriage, conversion to Catholicism, and medical and literary career.Amazon.com Review
The author is particularly well qualified to evaluate novelistWalker Percy's philosophical interests and 1947 conversion toCatholicism: Patrick Samway, a Jesuit priest, edited a volume ofPercy's uncollected essays and another of his correspondence on thesubject of American semiotician Charles Sanders Pierce. Although heknew Percy (1916-90) personally in his final years, Samway maintains ascholarly distance in this meticulously researched biography. It doesnot supplant Jay Tolson's more passionate 1992 assessment, but offersa valuable additional perspective. ... Read more

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This volume contains collection of ten essays that focus on the fiction and non-fiction of southern novelist Walker Percy (1916-1990).Delivered during the 2002 Walker Percy Undergraduate Seminar held at Southwestern College in Winfield, KS, the contibutors focus upon a wide array of topics relevant to the study of Percy's writings. Catholicism, race relations, existenialism and even Percy's semiotics receive attention in this dynamic collection. ... Read more

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Accessible and Useful
No better book has been written on the subject. ... Read more

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This valuable and informative book is a study of Percy's five novels in the context of his southern and American literary sources and his tragic personal history. Though Percy has emphasized mainly his European existential influences, his highly allusive novels echo his tragic early years in the South, as well as his ambivalent relationship with his adoptive father William Alexander Percy and his awareness of such writers as Twain, Hemingway, and Warren.

This perceptive study examines Percy's novels in the light of psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and literary analysis. The author finds that Percy's fiction has been shaped as much by what Percy rejected as by what he embraced. ... Read more

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An Essential Volume of Percy Criticism
William Rodney Allen's Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer is one of the finest studies of novelist Walker Percy. While most Percy criticism emphasizes Percy's theological interests--sometimes to the detriment of the works--Allen offers a complex reading that blends biographical research, psychoanalysis, and intertextuality. His readings are mostly unassailable, and he makes a fine case for Percy as not just an important Southern or Catholic author, but an important American author as well, working with and subverting some of the ideas of Twain and Hemingway. Highly recommended. ... Read more

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This collection of interviews supplements Conversations with Walker Percy and occasions an additional two dozen pleasurable encounters with Percy. Primarily from the last ten years of Percy's life, they show how his presence was stimulating thought in much of humanistic America, in literature, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and in cultural life in general.

Although this acclaimed author of The Moviegoer, Lancelot, and Love in the Ruins never overcame his shyness with interviewers, he continued to grant interviews as long as his health permitted. This act of openness illustrates his humility before his ideas and his desire to help others understand them.

The interviews in this collection show him at a height when he knew that his illness would not allow him to write any more books, and that the only way to restate his ideas and offer a valediction to the large audience to whom he had always been kind, patient, and appreciative was to speak out. Percy despised the posture of many modern self-proclaimed intellectuals who delight in cloaking ideas in jargon and abstraction. He always tried to express himself clearly and as free of reservations as possible. These interviews reflect that clarity. ... Read more

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For Walker Percy Lovers Only
It isn't that MORE CONVERSATIONS WITH WALKER PERCY isn't a helpful book in learning more about this great writer. It is. The problem is that the interviews are very repetitive. Percy says the same thing over and over again. He is passionate, for instance, that the scientific method cannot explain man. He also talks openly about his Christian faith and Catholic convictions and his dismay at modernization of the Faith. Obviously, this reinforces what he is about as a writer, but the book would have been better with some more variety. ... Read more

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In Search Of Self teaches us how to recognize true, living selfhood in ourselves and in others, and how to recognize a failure to attain it, in our world which encourages "death-in-life. Taylor lends concreteness to the search for selfhood as he turns to characters in Walker Percy's novels who have reached selfhood in very real ways. He points out how certain choices and actions helped characters achieve a sense of themselves, and how we may make similar choices for our own lives. Taylor also uses Kierkegaard'a notion of the self and the self's stages of development to crystalize the readers' grasp on the meaning of selfhood. ... Read more

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In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction—Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy—expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned —and sometimes ritually sanctified—victimization of those deemed outcasts. Ciuba offers an impressively broad intellectual discussion that gives universal cultural meaning to the southern experience of desire, violence, and divinity with which these four authors wrestled and out of which they wrote. In a comprehensive analysis of Porter's semiautobiographical Miranda stories, Ciuba focuses on the prescribed role of women that Miranda imitates and ultimately escapes. O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away reveals three characters whose scandalous animosity caused by religious rivalry leads to the unbearable stumbling block of violence. McCarthy's protagonist in Child of God, Lester Ballard, appears as the culmination of a long tradition of the sacred violence of southern religion, twisted into his own bloody faith. And Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome brings Ciuba's discussion back to the victim, in Tom Moore's renunciation of a society in which scapegoating threatens to become the foundation of a new social regime. From nostalgia for the old order to visions of a utopian tomorrow, these authors have imagined the interrelationship of desire, antagonism, and religion throughout southern history. Ciuba's insights offer new ways of reading Porter, O'Connor, McCarthy, and Percy as well as their contemporaries who inhabited the same culture of violence—violence desired, dreaded, denied, and deified.AUTHOR BIO: Gary M. Ciuba is the author of Walker Percy: Books of Revelations and numerous articles on modern southern fiction.He is a professor of English at Kent State University. ... Read more

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A good local history is an excellent andagreeable thing. It pleases on two counts. It satisfies the curiosity of theinhabitants of a region, whether newcomers or old settlers, especially if noadequate history had existed before. It dispels myths, corrects old wives'tales. And, if the history is first-rate, it goes beyond a factual account ofpersons and places, the particularities of a region, and shows the significanceof these human happenings in a larger scheme of things, in this case theemergence of a new nation.Ellis's history succeeds on both counts. It is a delightful andauthoritative account of lore which not even St. Tammanyites may have heard of.Did you know, for example, that there was once a flourishing wine industry inSt. Tammany Parish? That local vineyards produced excellent red and whitewines, the red from Concord grapes, the white from Herbemont? Did you know thatin 1891 a rice crop of 50,000 barrels was harvested, half the entire output ofSouth Carolina? . . .Ellis has rendered this pleasant and authoritative history in a graceful andlively style and with a genuine affection for the people he writes about.Walker PercyFrom the Foreword ... Read more