Introduction to Walker Percy
The Walker Percy Project is a collaborative project. Your comments and participation are welcome!
The Purpose of this Project
This project seeks to raise appreciation for the contributions
to modern thought and fiction that Walker Percy, MD, has left as a formidable,
compelling legacy to humanity.
Percy's provocative integration of philosophy,
science, and art together througout his writings is nothing less than strikingly
original, and his "diagnostic" vision as a thinker and novelist
remains a unique, if not invaluable critical perspective on the human condition
of the late 20th-century.
The project is designed to accommodate the general
browser by providing an introduction to Percy and his thought as well as
serve as a comprehensive, up-to-date "clearinghouse of information" for the professional researcher.
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 Walker Percy:
An Interactive-Allegorical Portrait [Soon to be Shockwave enhanced!]
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Walker Percy: Artist, Philosopher, Scientist
Who is Walker Percy? |
A Brief Biography
| Important Dates
A FIRST PERCY QUOTE The Strange Case of the Self, your self,
the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos...Why it is that of all the billions
and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars,
black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest?
--from the Preface to Lost in the Cosmos
Image: A Casual
Photograph of the Novelist
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How does Percy speak to us? Perhaps it is because of his ever-vigilant insight into the widespread ambiguity and inconsistency of the modern scientific era. Indeed, his peculiar knack for being able to speak to the individual in an age of "abstraction" is all the more poignant when we consider how artfully he expresses himself through his chosen medium of fiction.
On a philosophical/moral level, Percy might readily be compared to Kierkegaard the Danish existentialist or the important American moralist Ralph Waldo Emerson; on a scientific level, he might be compared with Copernicus or perhaps Freud for his revolutionary perspective on the human place in the cosmos relative to his language theory; while on an artistic level, he might equally compare well with Dostoyevsky or T.S. Eliot for the sensitivity of his vision and the poetic way in which he creates his fiction.
All combined, Percy reveals himself a kind of "post-modern" Da Vinci, but using the American South as his canvas and drawing board rather than Renaissance Italy. Sketching human drama, faithful to the tragic and comedic alike, with the best of human thought and art behind it...
--Henry P. Mills
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Click on the collage for a quick introduction to Walker Percy's fiction.
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| Return to welcome. |
Last updated: 27 December 1997
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