The Work of Walker Percy: Fiction and Philosophy

Feature essays and interviews on and by Walker Percy


"The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end....[but he] is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over..."

--W.P. from "Notes for a Novel About the End of the World"

Introductory Essays

  1. *The Novels by John R. May
  2. *Philosophy (General) by Joe Pellegrino
  3. *Philosophy of Language (Semiotics) by Henry P. Mills
Feature Essays

  1. Walker Percy: Pilgrim in the Ruins by Jay Tolson
  2. Walker Percy's Homeward Journey by Patrick H. Samway, S.J.
  3. Walker Percy and Southern Literature by Veronica Makowsky
  4. Neurobiology and Psychoanalysis in the Work of Walker Percy by Lewis Lawson
  5. Walker Percy's Triad: Science, Literature and Religion by John F. Desmond
  6. "That Mysterious Phenomenon": The Affect of Percy's Works upon Readers by Kenneth Laine Ketner
  7. *Found in the Cosmos: Percy's First Self-Help Book by Gary Ciuba
  8. *Psychological and Genetic Factors in Understanding Walker Percy's Art by Bertram Wyatt-Brown
  9. *The Semiotics of Memory: Suicide in The Second Coming by Gerald Kennedy
  10. *Elegies for Gentleman: Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman and Eudora Welty's "The Demonstrators" by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
  11. *Shadowing Binx by Robert Coles
Interviews
  1. Review of More Conversations with Walker Percy by Nikki Barranger
  2. The Study of Consciousness: An Interview with Walker Percy by Linda Whitney Hobson
  3. The Modern Prognosis: An Interview with Walker Percy by Brent Short
  4. National Literary Conference, October 1985, LSU (MP3 Audio, 9.3MB) by Wade Riddick. To download a text transcript, click here (Word document).
  5. *A Talk with Walker Percy by Elzbieta Oleksy
Miscellaneous
  1. Resources on Percy's Semiotic
  2. *Summaries of Percy's Novels by Edward Dupuy

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Last updated: 22 June 2001