Walker Percy's own existence began auspiciously, on May 28, 1916, smack in the middle of a prominent southern family. His father, LeRoy, conducted a successful law practice in Birmingham, where he married Martha Susan Phinizy, who gave him three sons: Walker, LeRoy, and Phinizy. But tragedy struck in 1929, when Mr. Percy shot himself in the attic of the family home.
        Such a shattering event must have affected the boys profoundly, especially the oldest. He never talked about it publicly, but in his novels fathers are shadowy figures--always distracted, looking away to some unrealized ideal.

Percy's abiding interest, which he acquired early and never abandoned, was the mystery at the heart of all human existence.

        Shortly after, the family accepted an invitation to move in with William Alexander Percy in Greenville, Mississippi. "Mister Will" was the late LeRoy Percy's first cousin, who occupied a big house and possessed a sterling reputation as gardener, lawyer, traveler, and man of letters. Two years after moving to Greenville, Martha Susan Percy drove her car off a bridge and was killed--a possible suicide and another violent experience the author never discussed. W.A. Percy, whom all three boys called Uncle Will, not only kept them but legally adopted them.
        What motivated the confirmed bachelor and globe-trotter to take on such a task? "A very strong sense of family," Walker speculated, decades later. "I think maybe he had the notion of giving us the benefit of exposure to him. ... But there was always a sense of conflict. After all, it was a crushing responsibility for somebody like him to take on. I'm always amazed that he did it."
        Uncle Will's parenting style emphasized exposure and example over direct instruction. His house was a gathering place of notable figures such as Henry Stack Sullivan, Carl Sandburg, Stephen Vincent Benet, and William Faulkner (who played tennis in the backyard when he was sober). But the boys needed peer companionship, too; Greenville native Shelby Foote recalls an afternoon at the country club pool when the august Mister Will approached and recruited him to be a pal for his young relatives. Foote, then thirteen, formed an especially close relationship with Walker, and the two remained friends for life.
        In 1941, W.A. Percy published Lanterns on the Levee, the memoir by which he's remembered today. In one of the later chapters, "To the Younger Generation," he reflects how the boys' arrival forced him to reconsider his version of the eternal verities in order to pass them on. By temperament and tradition he was drawn to the old Roman virtues of honor, fortitude, and patience with those less fortunate. While giving all due respect to Jesus and the Buddha, his real hero was Marcus Aurelius. "None of us [he wrote] has found truth, but we can affirm honesty, and that at least the young may demand of us." Satisfied that he had met those demands, he dedicated Lanterns in part to "Walker, Roy, and Phin."

Percy sits with his dog Sweet Thing in his Covington, Louisiana backyard in April 1987.
Bettmann / Corbis

        All three were launched on their adult lives by then. Phinizy was studying law, LeRoy was managing the estate, and Walker, after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in chemistry, had completed a premed program at Columbia and begun his residency at Bellevue Hospital. His interest in science developed early but with no clear goal. Without realizing it at the time, he loved science for its own sake and not for its possibilities--charmed by precision and pattern, tantalized by the possibility that science might someday explain everything. The path that led him through chemistry suggested a career in pathology. But those vague ambitions came to an abrupt end when, in the course of performing autopsies on tubercular corpses, he contracted TB himself.
        His case was not critical, but it sent him to a sanitarium in Saranac, New York, for two years. The silver lining was that now he had unlimited time to read and think, leading him to realize he wasn't that interested in medicine anyway. "What began to interest me ... was not the physiological and pathological processes within a man's body but the problem of man himself ... specifically, the predicament of man in a modern technological society." The European novelists Dostoyevsky and Camus explored the same concerns, and he was intrigued by their use of fiction to illuminate modern philosophy. Readings in philosophy itself led him to a particular substratum of human development, namely the unique character of human language. No one had adequately explained the phenomenon, though some theorists came close. Could it be that science had no answer?
        Eventually, two nineteenth-century philosophers provided a key to his questions about language in particular, and man in general. The first was Kierkegaard, who shook the ground under Percy's assumptions by refusing to assume anything. "The great bombshell with me was the famous passage of Kierkegaard's describing Hegel as the philosopher who lived in a shanty outside the palace of his own system, and saying that Hegel knew everything and said everything, except what it is to be born and to live and to die." For the first time Percy realized that scientific study, which purports to take place at a level above human experience, was actually as much a part of human experience as art, emotion, and religion. "I saw for the first time through Kierkegaard how to take the alternative system seriously, how to treat it as a serious thinker, a serious writer. Before that I would have simply seen it as religion or emotion. I hadn't seen any way to think about it. Kierkegaard gave me a way to think about it."

ut there were other things to think about as well--namely what to do with his life. In the years from 1944 to 1948, without a well-defined plan, he made several course-setting decisions. After a short period teaching pathology at Columbia, he suffered a relapse and returned to the South, this time for good. Back in Greenville, he renewed an acquaintance with Mary Bernice Townsend, better known as "Bunt," and married her in November 1946. One month later, the couple received their first communion in the Catholic Church.

His reading and thinking had led to a conviction that the very existence of man was beyond anyone's capacity to explain. The church, while perhaps not satisfactory in all its answers, at least gave full credit to that mystery.

        This was a step Percy had considered for a long time, though nothing in his upbringing would have predicted it. His best friend, now embarked on a promising literary career, had little regard for dogma: "Faith kills art," Foote bluntly advised in a letter. W.A. Percy, who had died in 1942, would have regarded Walker's decision with bewilderment, hoping he would grow out of it. But, like the choice of a wife and a place to live (Covington, Louisiana, where he moved in 1948), this decision was made to last. Percy was "onto something." His reading and thinking had led to a conviction that the very existence of man was beyond anyone's capacity to explain. The church, while perhaps not satisfactory in all its answers, at least gave full credit to that mystery.
        An inheritance from Uncle Will allowed him the freedom to pursue his interests, especially his inquiries into language development. Because of his scientific training, the quest was technical as well as philosophical, especially when his second daughter, Anne Boyd, was born totally deaf. Searching for teachers and teaching approaches opened up the subject of human communication even further. His investigation into semiotics, or the study of signs and sign language, led to the publication of his first essay, "Symbol as Need," in the psychological journal Thought (August 1954). It also uncovered Percy's second great nineteenth-century mentor, Charles Peirce.
        Peirce, known today as the "father of pragmatism," had posed one theory of language that seemed to make sense. In contrast to natural scientists such as Darwin (and later behavioral scientists such as Skinner), he proposed that the process by which a mind accepts a word as symbol for the thing it denotes is an irreducible triad of mind, symbol, and object. Thus the phenomenon of human language--unlike the sign-based communication among lower animals--could not be explained through a stimulus-response model, however sophisticated.
        Taking Peirce's conclusion a step further, Percy wondered if the sense of disconnection peculiar to man, and modern society in particular, owed something to the character of his language. Rather than merely respond to signs, humans continually re-create the world through symbols. " I cannot know anything at all unless I symbolize it. We can only conceive being, sidle up to it by laying something else alongside." Alone of all creatures, humans have the capacity of naming, perceiving, and talking about life while living, a godlike quality that keeps them at odds with their own flesh. Why do they often feel alone in society? Why unsatisfied even in the midst of plenty, or unhappy when all their desires are met?
        And why not explore the problem through fiction, in effect "laying something else"--a story--alongside the mystery of being? Percy had in fact finished two fiction manuscripts by 1954. Both, he decided, were unpublishable. But the idea of the philosophical novel, which fascinated him about Camus and Dostoyevsky, never let go. In 1959 he began work on The Moviegoer.

he novel, dedicated "In gratitude to 'W.A. Percy,' was published by A.A. Knopf two years later. Its editor, Stanley Kauffman, had decided to take a chance on the unknown writer, even though the manuscript submitted to him needed work. It eventually went through four revisions, "and each time," Kauffman recalls, "it came back not only 'improved,' but more brilliant, more comic, more delightful." The appearance of The Moviegoer in the spring of 1961 attracted favorable reviews but unremarkable sales, until something remarkable happened early in 1962: the National Book Award. "I didn't think the judges would have that much sense," Flannery O'Connor remarked in a congratulatory letter. Everyone was surprised, not least the author. In a single bound he had leaped to the top tier of American novelists--a worthy successor, some suggested, to Faulkner's legacy.
        But The Moviegoer would be the most "southern" of Percy's novels, in itself marking a distinct turning away from the tradition of Uncle Will. The antagonist of the book turns out to be Binx's Aunt Emily, an exemplary, eloquent spokesman for the old South and its Aurelian virtues. Binx (and his creator) are already looking forward to the new South, where carpetbagged ambition and enterprise meet traditional pride and piety and come up with something like the modern age.

Percy wondered if the sense of disconnection peculiar to man, and modern society in particular, owed something to the character of his language.

        As if to mark the change, The Last Gentleman was published in 1966 under a different imprint: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. The story begins in New York City, where Willison Barrett, former medical student, is marking time in Macy's basement as "maintenance engineer"--essentially, night janitor. Like Binx Bolling, Will is a nice young man but suffers from syndromes mental and physical: periodic memory loss, spastic motion, and unfocused longing. He's also deaf in one ear--a reverberation, never explicit, of the self-inflicted shotgun blast that killed his father years before. His identity is in flux--he's referred to throughout as "the engineer," and indeed serves as temperature controller and pressure regulator to an entire family of transplanted southerners. The Vaught family includes Jamie, a dying teenager; Val, an intellectual turned nun; Sutter, the scion; and Sutter's ex-wife, Rita, a repository of skeptical virtues. Sutter seems as eloquent of skeptical vices--not only a doubter, but an alcoholic, womanizer, and squanderer of his own talent. Yet Sutter is "onto something," and through an odyssey that takes him back home and beyond, Will drifts closer to him. After years of suffering passively and allowing circumstances to guide him, Will finally makes a decision to at least start asking the right questions. At the end he is literally chasing his new mentor through the Southwestern desert, as "strength flowed like oil into his muscles and he ran with great, joyous, ten-foot antelope bounds."
        Unlike Bolling and Barrett, the protagonist of Percy's next novel has an answer--but the answer is wrong. Love in the Ruins (1971) is a comic dystopia set not too far in the future, where "things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman." The hero, Dr. Tom More, patrols the decayed society of Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, with a bottle of Early Times in one hand and a secret invention in the other. The invention is More's Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer, a device for "bridging the dread chasm between body and mind that has sundered the soul of Western man for five hundred years." He recognizes the problem ("Only in man does the self miss self, fall from itself"). Instead of bridging the chasm, his device is used to smother the "angel" in man, giving free rein to the beast. The results are disastrous but not fatal. Properly chastened, Dr. More settles down with a good woman and retires to "barbecuing in my sackcloth," comforted by the very fact that he's not wholly comfortable.
        The title character of Lancelot (1977) faces the same dilemma of reconciling angel and beast, but without the saving grace. We encounter him first in an unnamed institution--a prison? asylum?--telling his story to an old friend nicknamed Percival. Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a semiretired lawyer, owns a crumbling estate that's only good now for movie sets. The discovery that his second wife has been unfaithful propels him on an Arthurian quest--not for the Holy Grail but for the unholy grail. What bothers him most is not his wife's adultery but his lack of outrage over it. He has been unmanned by psychological relativism: "In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what's needed is a quest for evil," which will justify God's wrath, if such a being exists. Through a careful application of law and science, Lancelot manages to summon righteous anger, with results that are fatal but perhaps not disastrous. By pouring out judgment on Sodom, he destroys his own world. But while telling the story, he's opening up communication with a fellow patient, a girl so abused she's lost the power of speech. Lancelot develops a language for talking to her, just as modern man must develop new ways to talk about eternal truths, once the old order collapses.

ercy's continuing inquiries into communication finally resulted in a collection of essays on the subject: The Message in the Bottle (1975), subtitled How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do With the Other. At times--after every novel, in fact--he was tempted to abandon fiction and concentrate on writing of this kind: philosophical, even technical. By now he was nationally recognized, analyzed, and selected for book clubs, but writing novels still struck him as an improbable way for a grown man to make a living. "This is all going to end badly," he confessed to Foote after Lancelot: "I'm going to end up old, broke, and a flasher." On the contrary, his friend assured him, "It sounded to me like you had just the amount of despair in your soul to make you happy"; certainly not enough to stop writing fiction. Percy was soon drafting a novel about another semiretired lawyer, widowed and independently wealthy, who wakes up in midlife to the notion that he's never lived.

At times--after every novel, in fact--he was tempted to abandon fiction and concentrate on writing of this kind: philosophical, even technical writing.

        Halfway through the draft, Percy realized that the character was actually Will Barrett, twenty years after his encounter with the Vaught family and still largely clueless. Beset by a disease that makes him fall down at awkward times and fills him with "inappropriate longing," he makes a bet with God, daring the Deity to prove His existence. Instead God proves Will's existence by dropping him almost literally into the arms of Allison, an escapee from a mental hospital. Allie has been wiped clean through electroshock treatments and is starting a life so new she has to make up her own idiosyncrasies for it. Through her eyes, Will discovers that inappropriate longing is better than the kind this world deems appropriate: "What is it I want from her ... not only want but must have? Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver?"
        Percy considered Second Coming (1980) to be his sunniest, most unambiguous novel. After its publication he took a long hiatus from fiction and began assembling notes for a very ambiguous project, which he characterized as "smart-aleck non-fiction." Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1989) attempts to get to the heart of "the loss of self and a possible means for recovery." A recipe for peculiar, in other words. Much of the book is presented as questions, quizzes, and "thought experiments," with satires on Phil Donahue and Carl Sagan thrown in. The questions include such assumption-challenging posers as why bad news makes people happy and why, confronted with a group photograph, most people will immediately search out themselves: "Don't you know what you look like?" Lost in the Cosmos confounded critics but drew a small body of hard-core enthusiasts. To date, it's the only book by Percy adapted for performance, namely in a stage play by Tom Key.

he Thanatos Syndrome (1987) celebrated Percy's return to fiction by returning to Dr. Tom More: "the character most like you," according to Foote. Many of the characters from Love in the Ruins reappear, yet The Thanatos Syndrome appears to take place in an alternative universe, with little direct reference to the earlier book. The devil is still at work in Feliciana Parish, and this time the mischief is something in the water. Dr. More, a psychiatrist with a desultory practice, begins to notice a change in his patients: angst-ridden, guilty souls become placid and content, displaying behaviors more typical of primates than humans. Other significant developments appear: crime rates have gone down, student test scores have gone up; his own wife has become a bridge prodigy (and also, to his delight and dismay, something of a nymphomaniac).
        Investigations reveal that the cause is heavy sodium in the water supply, an experiment engineered by some of Dr. More's colleagues. Their motives appear benign: "What counts in the end is affection instead of cruelty, love instead of hate, right?" By eliminating doubt, guilt, and self-destructive impulses, humanity will be happy at last. But to be doubt-free, guilt-free, and sorrow-free, Dr. More perceives, is to be less than human; its end is not love but death. He thwarts the social engineers by giving them a taste of their own medicine, restoring to humanity a precarious hold on its birthright.

By eliminating doubt, guilt, and self-destructive impulses, humanity will be happy at last. But to be doubt-free, guilt-free, and sorrow-free, Dr. More perceives, is to be less than human; its end is not love but death.

        A year after Thanatos appeared, Walker Percy was at the Mayo Clinic undergoing a new treatment for prostate cancer. But it was too late for the treatment to do much good. "Dying, if that's what it comes to, is no big thing," he wrote to Foote. "What is a pain is not even the pain but the nuisance." The "nuisance" was at least short-lived. After returning to Covington his condition grew worse until all that could be done was keep him comfortable. On May 10, 1990, he died quietly, surrounded by family and friends.
        Eulogies abounded, but he himself probably wrote the best one, years before, in an Esquire article titled "Questions They Never Asked Me So He Asked Them Himself." To a self-posed question about the meaning of life, he answered, "This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer 'Scientific humanism.' That won't do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. ... I don't see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him."
        Perhaps what a reader sees in Walker Percy's novels are the footprints and sand gouges of a lifelong wrestling match--which the author may well have won.