Walker Percy

When he won the National Book Award in 1962 for his first novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy quickly established a wide and devoted following. Trained as a physician (who never practiced medicine after suffering from tuberculosis in the 1940s), Dr. Percy became a careful diagnostician of modern society in five subsequent novels and three non-fiction books. This biography, written with Percy's approval and assistance, allows his life to unfold as he lived it, with its unexpected twists and complexities. The tragic deaths of his father and mother, different in manner but close in time, were traumatic events for their teenage son. His subsequent adoption by Uncle Will - William Alexander Percy, the noted writer and patrician - extended his cultural horizons. After his studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Columbia University's School of Medicine, he married Mary Bernice Townsend. Patrick Samway's meticulous biography tracks their conversion to Roman Catholicism and Percy's dogged determination to continue his career as a novelist and semiotician in Covington, Louisiana.