Walker Percy

Patrick Samway, SJ has a written a new biography of the great Catholic Novelist, Walker Percy. Percy was a great writer whose work tells a good story, but he also had the goal of "refashioning the epistomological basis of our culture". He believed that there was something more than merely the mind and the body and set out to illustrate this. Mr. Percy is not a hero of the anti-intellectual. The person who would pick up one of his novels should be ready to think. (Try it; it's good exercize.)

Walker Percy was orphaned at an early age and was raised by a curmudgeonly plantation owner in the Mississippi Delta. William Percy was a reknown author in his own right. His most famous work depicts his life and is called Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. William Percy was an eccentric who was not shy about making his views known. He once said that a gentleman only needed to study two works to guide him in this life. One was the Bible and the other was the Meditations of the stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Lanterns on the Levee is a grand, last justification for the plantation life that was passing from the American scene in the 1930's and is now lost to us.