Walker Percy: Biography

L. Lamar Nisley, "Walker Percy: The Writer as Diagnostic Canary to Pilgrim Wayfarers" in Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, and Pilgrim Wayfarers: Constructions of Audience and Tone in O'Connor, Gautreaux, and Percy. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2011.


Early Years

Percy early years were spent in Birmingham, Alabama. He was born into an aristocratic family with a history going back to England. Both his father and grandfather were lawyers, and were well respected. Sadly, both of them committed suicide. After his father;s suicide in 1929, Percy and his family moved to Athens, Georgia to live with his mother's family for a year. It was eventually decided that they would move to Greenville, Mississippi to live with his cousin, Will Percy, referred to as Uncle Will. Soon after moving to Greenville, Walker's mother died in a car accident or suicide. William Alexander Percy (Uncle Will) would adopt the two boys and raise them. There were teenagers when they moved in with Uncle Will.

Walker attended University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and graduated in Chemistry. he would go on to medical school at Colombia University in New York. During his pathology internship, Walker contracted tuberculosis which caused him to spend a few years at two sanitariums. It was at this time Percy began reading the existentialists and Kierkegaard and others. This reading would transform his life. He would experience three conversions at the same time: convert to Roman Catholicism, get married, and commit to the vocation of a novelist.

Uncle Will would be a major influence on Will. The Percy family was highly respected in Greenville and artists, writers, musicians, and scholars gathered regularly at Uncle Will's house. It was through Uncle Will that Walker Percy would meet Shelby Foote and they will become life-long friends. Uncle Will's worldview was Southern Stoicism, best represented by Binx's aunt in The Moviegoer. Nisley states, In much of his writing, Percy identifies the philosophical stance of his relatives as stoical, influenced more by a Roman than a Christian value system" (141).

Walker's move to Greenville would be an "immersion in the old south." It would also be his first introduction to Roman Catholicism. Walker and his family had attended a liberal Presbyterian church in Birmingham, and his family on his mother's side were Presbyterian. Religion on his father's side was a household made up of "lapsed-Catholic Episcopalian looseness, very sociable, with people drifting in and out of the house" (141). Uncle Will had one time considered becoming a priest, but he was discouraged out of it by his family. Uncle Will would always have a great respect for the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition. Uncle Will rejected traditional beliefs, but maintained contact with the Catholic Church.

Uncle Will had an important influence on Walker as previously mentioned. He taught Walker about literature, music, and the arts. Walker described Uncle Will as his teacher: "But he was more than a teacher. What he was to me was a fixed point in a confusing world. This is not to say I always took him for my true north and set my course accordingly. I did not. [...] But even when I did not follow him, it was usually in relation to him, whether with him or against him, that I defined my own self and my own direction" (LOL xi). Nisley suggests that Percy's view of community began with his Uncle Will. It seems Uncle Will's relation to Roman Catholicism might have had some influence on Walker's later conversion. Although, Walker was an agnostic from his teenage years  until he converted after contracting tuberculosis. Uncle Will did not go to church, but he "was always talking about the Great Catholic tradition" (142). Nisley adds, "While the parallel is inexact, since Percy came to a deep acceptance of traditional Catholic faith instead of Will's skepticism, one could argue that Uncle Will provided Percy with a model for maintaining enough distance from church tradition to critique it even while recognizing its benefits" (142). If nothing else, Uncle Will introduced Percy to the Roman Catholic community.

Percy and his brothers did attend the Presbyterian Church as a teenager in Greenville, but it did not answer his questions. His uncle's stoicism was no help either. It seems Percy was looking for certainty in an uncertain world. He did find answers in science and had an "exaggerated faith in science" better known as scientism (142-43). While at Columbia University, Percy met with a psychiatrist for three years as part of his medical training. It seems that he probably would have become a psychiatrist if he would have continued in medicine.

Besides Uncle Will, Percy had models of Roman Catholicism from different people in his college years. One of them lived in his fraternity house at the University of North Carolina. When he was in the Sanatorium, a Roman Catholic argued philosophy and theology with him. Nisley states, "In his desire to win these debates, Percy began reading Augustine and Aquinas, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. After he was more mobile, he visited a Catholic church with Arthur Fortugno out of curiosity. These readings and conversations began to show Percy some of the shortcomings of science" (144). Percy would later say that Kierkegaard was influential in his conversion. Percy states, "Kierkegaard helped me see them [weaknesses in science]. He said, 'Hegel told everything about the world except one thing: what it is to be a man and live and die" (CWP 11).