Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Jay Tolson

Like many of the best biographies, Pilgrim in the Ruins offers the satisfactions of a good novel: strong themes, fine prose, sensitive appreciation of character, shrewd understanding of how the individual interacts with society and, most important of all, a fascinating protagonist." - Wendy Smith, Cleveland Plain Dealer

Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for the young Southern gentleman. Although millions have read Percy's books, few understand his deeply troubled, deeply Southern family past. Tolson takes readers into the great salons of the literary South in this first major biography of Percy.

The first major biography of Walker Percy traces his literary career back to his childhood days spent carousing with Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty on his uncle's plantation.

Table of Contents:

• The Percy Family: A Selected Genealogy
• Magic City
• From New South to Old
• Uncle Will
• Greenville Days
• Chapel Hill
• The Healer's Art
• The Shadow of Death
• Drift and Resolution
• A Second Apprenticeship
• The Consolations of Philosophy
• Carnival in Gentilly
• Peregrinations
• Apocalyptic Mirth
• The Third Half of Life
• The Knight, Death, and the Devil
• Second Sightings
• Thanatos and After

Jay Tolson is editor of The Wilson Quarterly.

Publication Date: 1992

Hardcover: 544 pages