“Whatever impetus I had towards writing owes nothing to sitting on a porch listening to anybody tell stories about the South, believe me,” Walker Percy once observed in an interview. “I think the day of regional Southern writing is all gone. I think that people who try to write in that style are usually repeating a phased out genre or doing Faulkner badly.” Deeply immersed in Christian existentialism, Percy spent the greater part of his life and career, like so many of his protagonists, resisting the lure of his familial and regional antecedents in Mississippi and Louisiana, yet the six novels he produced, as well as his two nonfiction books and numerous essays in philosophy and semiotics, never quite managed to extricate the writer from a family legacy marked, in historian…
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Citation: Donaldson, Susan. "Walker Percy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 July 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3533, accessed 23 November 2024.]
