Walker Percy (1916–1990)
Autor/a de The Moviegoer
Sobre l'autor
Walker Percy, May 28, 1916 - May 10, 1990 Walker Percy, born in Alabama, raised in Mississippi, and a former resident of Louisiana, was a member of a prominent Southern family who lost his parents at an early age and grew up as the foster son of his father's cousin. Percy graduated from the mostra'n més University of North Carolina and received his M.D. from Columbia, but was a nonpracticing physician who devoted much of his life to his writing. Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), won the 1962 National Book Award, but Charles Poore considers The Last Gentleman (1966) "an even better book." Love in the Ruins (1971) marks a sharp change in method and subject from the first two novels. A doomsday story set "at the end of the Auto Age," it exposes many foibles and abuses in contemporary life through sharp satire and extravagant fantasy. Whereas Love in the Ruins is funny, Percy's next novel, Lancelot (1977) is the rather bleak and pessimistic story of a deranged man who blows up his home when he finds proof of his wife's infidelities and then tells his story in an asylum for the mentally disturbed. Its apocalyptic vision is expressed in a more positive and affirmative way in The Second Coming (1980), which takes its title from the fact that it resurrects the character of Will Barret from The Last Gentleman and locates him, a quarter-century older, finding love and meaning in a cave. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra'n menys
Sèrie
Obres de Walker Percy
The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (1975) 471 exemplars
Bourbon 2 exemplars
Souvenirs de l' oncle Will 1 exemplars
The City of the Dead 1 exemplars
Percy Walker 1 exemplars
Obres associades
Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (1941) — Introducció, algunes edicions — 286 exemplars
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss (2000) — Col·laborador — 216 exemplars
An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine (2000) — Col·laborador — 131 exemplars
Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement (2001) — Col·laborador — 90 exemplars
Best of The Oxford American: Ten Years from the Southern Magazine of Good Writing {anthology} (2002) — Col·laborador — 43 exemplars
Rediscoveries: Informal Essays in Which Well-Known Novelists Rediscover Neglected Works of Fiction by One of Their… (1971) — Col·laborador — 27 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Data de naixement
- 1916-05-28
- Data de defunció
- 1990-05-10
- Lloc d'enterrament
- St. Joseph Benedictine Abbey, St. Benedict, Louisiana, USA
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- USA
- Lloc de naixement
- Birmingham, Alabama, USA
- Lloc de defunció
- Covington, Louisiana, USA
- Causa de la mort
- prostate cancer
- Llocs de residència
- Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Athens, Georgia, USA
Greenville, Mississippi, USA
Covington, Louisiana, USA
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA (mostra-les totes 7)
Saranac Lake, New York, USA - Educació
- University of North Carolina (BA|1937)
Columbia University (MD|1941) - Professions
- novelist
essayist
physician
teacher - Relacions
- Percy, William Alexander (cousin)
Foote, Shelby (friend)
Gordon, Caroline (friend)
Spencer, Elizabeth (friend and colleague) - Organitzacions
- Order of Saint Benedict (oblate)
National Institute of Arts and Letters
Fellowship of Southern Writers (founding member)
Loyola University of New Orleans
Sigma Alpha Epsilon - Premis i honors
- Jefferson Lecture (1989)
T. S. Eliot Award (1988)
Laetare Medal (1989)
St. Louis Literary Award (1986)
Campion Award (1986)
National Institute of Arts and Letters (mostra-les totes 7)
American Academy of Arts and Letters
Membres
Converses
Note from Walker Percy a Deep South (abril 2013)
Novel about guy who loves the cinema a Name that Book (setembre 2011)
Ressenyes
Llistes
Premis
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 29
- També de
- 11
- Membres
- 12,454
- Popularitat
- #1,884
- Valoració
- 3.9
- Ressenyes
- 165
- ISBN
- 193
- Llengües
- 12
- Preferit
- 68
Binx Bolling doesn’t seem to be having a bad time of it, a young man successfully managing an office of the family brokerage firm in 1959/1960 New Orleans, having a series of dalliances with his secretaries, and going to a lot of movies. Only unlike most of us, he has the knowledge that such things are merely an effort to keep the existential despair at bay at the forefront of his mind. He instinctually feels the quote from Kierkegaard that is the novel’s epigraph: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair”. Now he knows he is in despair and thus he is a bit better off by Kierkegaard’s reckoning, a step closer to the solution to it, but he is still a long way off a grounding of himself in religious faith. The forms and husk of religion are all around him of course, being plenty thick in the “Christ-haunted” but not “Christ-centered” South, as Flannery O’Connor memorably phrased it, but Kierkegaard too would have recognized the deadness of them. The best Binx can do is an awareness of “wonder” and a rejection of that which he feels too grossly ignores or obscures the wonder.
His state of despair and inadequate search for resolution to it are best recognized for what they are by his step-cousin Kate, who is often in the grip of a strong depression, who seems possibly bipolar. Like recognizes like, in a manner. She tells him, “You remind me of a prisoner in the death house who takes a wry pleasure in doing things like registering to vote. Come to think of it, all your gaiety and good spirits have the same death house quality. No thanks. I’ve had enough of your death house pranks”. She tells him, “It is possible, you know, that you are overlooking something, the most obvious thing of all. And you would not know it if you fell over it.” Not that she knows what it is either, rather she’s given up the possible search: “Don’t you worry. I’m not going to swallow all the pills at once. Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.”
Binx, like Kate and Kierkegaard, understands the commonplace human tendency to hide our despair from ourselves, what he calls “sinking into everydayness”, even if the three of them (in the novel’s current moment at least) exist in pretty different places after similarly escaping it. Kierkegaard thinks he knows the answer. Kate thinks there is no answer. Binx, as befits a more modern day literary fiction hero, embraces uncertainty. Watching an apparently materially successful African-American man exiting church on Ash Wednesday, the ending day of the novel, ashes marked on forehead, he thinks
… (més)