Walker Percy

Walker Percy (1916–1990) was born in Birmingham, Alabama, into a family shadowed by tragedy—his grandfather and father both died by suicide. After his father's death, he was adopted by his uncle, the poet and planter William Alexander Percy, and raised in Greenville, Mississippi. He studied medicine at Columbia University but contracted tuberculosis during his residency, and the long convalescence that followed transformed him from a physician into a reader of philosophy and, eventually, a novelist. His conversion to Catholicism in 1947 profoundly shaped his intellectual life. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Moviegoer.