Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy by Jay Tolson


Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy
Title : Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0807844470
ISBN-10 : 9780807844472
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 544
Publication : First published January 1, 1992

When The Moviegoer, an extraordinary first novel by an unknown Louisiana author, won the National Book Award in 1962, it marked the arrival of an exceptional literary talent. With his five successive novels and his wide-ranging philosophical and occasional essays, Walker Percy shored up his reputation as one of America's greatest writers - an ironic moralist and perhaps the shrewdest chronicler of life in the New South. Yet even by the time of his death in 1990, little was known about this intensely private man. Based on extensive interviews, written with access to Percy's letters and manuscripts, Jay Tolson has fashioned the first major biography of the writer, an authoritative portrait that brings Percy alive as it illuminates his distinguished body of work. We see Percy's life and his brilliant career against the background of the American South, whose colorful and tragic history is rooted deeply in the hearts and minds of its most talented sons and daughters. With a novelist's eye for character and the judgment of an informed critic, Tolson captures the lifelong drama of genius, always attentive to its artistic, psychological and spiritual dimensions. Percy was the scion of a proud, honorable and accomplished family, a clan haunted by a crippling streak of melancholy that issued repeatedly in suicides, including the self-inflicted deaths of Walker Percy's father and grandfather. Tolson depicts the struggle of Percy's life and the heroism with which he battled his family demons (and his own tubercular condition) and worked his way toward a writing career. Here is the young Percy in the days after his father's death, traveling with his brother and his mother (who would soon dieherself, in mysterious circumstances) from his childhood home of Birmingham, Alabama, to Athens, Georgia, and then on to Greenville, Mississippi, and the sprawling house of his Uncle Will. Adopted at 16 by this remarkable "bachelor-poet-lawyer-planter, " the most important single influe

Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy Reviews

  • Charles Bechtel

    Same opinion as already recently stated. Off, though. reading about a novelist I have yet to read. A first.

  • Father Nick

    Tolson offers a thorough and sympathetic portrait of Percy's life and the aims of his literary and philosophical output. An initially off-putting broad history of the Percy family and their influence in Birmingham and Greenville is de rigeur for a literary biography, and readers that persevere will be rewarded with access to a deep mine of experience and reflection that Percy offers to an imploding culture. A few slips here and there by Tolson indicate his lack of familiarity with the teachings and practices of the Roman Catholicism Percy embraced and lived out till his death, and at times this no doubt colors Percy's own beliefs, but overall this biography left me deeply engaged with the mystery and wisdom of Walker Percy and eager to dive into his writings even more enthusiastically.

  • Drew Norwood

    Well-done. I don’t know if this is the best biography of Walker Percy (there are several other options that I haven’t read), but it is a good one.

    The title of the book aptly captures the theme of Walker Percy’s life and his work: modern man as "a wayfarer and a pilgrim” in the ruins of civilization. For Percy, man is most certainly a pilgrim, even when our culture views him more as an “organism in an environment”. And this pilgrimage is not a gentle saunter along the path of life. It’s a great struggle, a battle with the world, the flesh, and the devil. And for Percy, the Christian faith is the only answer to such a predicament.

  • Justin Pitt

    Simply put, this is the best biography I have ever read. The writing style is superb, and Tolson has an unbelievable grasp of his subject. If you are a Walker Percy fan, you must read this book.