Publication Order of Will Barrett Books
| The Last Gentleman | 1966 |
| The Second Coming | 1980 |
Publication Order of Dr. Tom More Books
| Love in the Ruins | 1971 |
| The Thanatos Syndrome | 1987 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Moviegoer | 1961 |
| Lancelot | 1977 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Message in the Bottle | 1975 |
| Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book | 1983 |
| Signposts in a Strange Land | 1991 |
| A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy (With: Kenneth Laine Ketner) | 1995 |
| The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy (With: Shelby Foote) | 1996 |
| Symbol and Existence: A Study in Meaning | 2019 |
About Walker Percy
Walker Percy (1916 to 1990) was an American novelist and essayist whose fiction deals with alienation, faith and the limits of science in modern life. His first novel, “The Moviegoer” (1961), won the National Book Award for Fiction, and he wrote five more novels. He is especially noted for his fiction set in New Orleans.
Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 28 May 1916. His father died by suicide in 1929 and his mother died two years later when her car went off a bridge, after which he and his two brothers were taken in by their cousin William Alexander Percy, a lawyer and poet in Greenville, Mississippi. There he met Shelby Foote, who became a lifelong friend. He studied chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and qualified as a doctor at Columbia University in 1941.
In 1942, while an intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he caught tuberculosis and spent several years in sanatoriums. He used the time to read Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Sartre, gave up medicine and became a Catholic in 1947. He married Mary Bernice Townsend in 1946 and the family settled in Covington, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.
“The Moviegoer” follows Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who drifts through cinemas and daydreams while searching for some meaning in his life. “The Last Gentleman” (1966) introduces Will Barrett, a displaced Southerner prone to fits of amnesia, and “The Second Coming” (1980) returns to him in middle age. “Love in the Ruins” (1971) and its sequel “The Thanatos Syndrome” (1987), his last novel, are satirical near-future stories about the Louisiana psychiatrist Dr Tom More. “Lancelot” (1977) is the confession of a lawyer held in a mental institution after murdering his wife.
Percy also wrote non-fiction on language and existentialism, including the essay collection “The Message in the Bottle” (1975) and “Lost in the Cosmos” (1983). While teaching at Loyola University New Orleans he was instrumental in getting John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” published in 1980. He received the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame and gave the Jefferson Lecture in 1989. He died of prostate cancer at home in Covington on 10 May 1990.