Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer

This valuable and informative book is a study of Percys 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 Percys novels in the light of psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and literary analysis. The author finds that Percys fiction has been shaped as much by what Percy rejected as by what he embraced.

This book is "admirable first of all for its good taste. It respects Walker Percys privacy. . . . It offers fair readings, generous readings, and ultimately new and rewarding readings." --Lewis Lawson