Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds.

— [from the Foreword]: "I am sure that my fellow writers will understand both my dismay and my gratitude. Writers are held to be a nutty lot by normal people. This may or may not be true. In this case I felt both nutty and grateful. Thanks, fellow nuts." – Walker Percy

This book of twenty-one essays from the first international symposium on Walker Percy held in Denmark is the most comprehensive study yet made of Percy's fiction, philosophical essays, and explorations of semiotics. It is an essential scholarly handbook for the study of Percy's writings.

Percy's death in May 1990 has occasioned widescale appreciations and retrospective assessments of the rich and philosophically restorative body of literature that he produced. This collection, from a conference held at the University of Aarhus in Denmark in 1989, acclaims him as a major writer who perhaps more deeply than any others probed into troubled hearts and puzzled minds in the late twentieth century.

These penetrating essays written by scholars who are among the most notable of Percy's European and American critics show the scale of international respect for Walker Percy's writings.

A comprehensive scholarly assessment of a great American writer by his most ardent European and American appreciators, with essays by Lewis A. Lawson, Gary M. Ciuba, Patrick Samway, S.J., W.L. Godshalk, Joseph Schwartz, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Susan V. Donaldson, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, Marion Montgomery, Kathleen Scullin, Linda Whitney Hobson, John F. Desmond, John Edward Hardy, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Ashley Brown, François Pitavy, William Rodney Allen, Elzbieta H. Oleksy, Patricia Lewis Poteat, Sue Mitchell Crowley, Jan Nordby Gretlund, and Karl-Heinz Westarp.

Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp are the editors of Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher

Publication Date: 1991