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Walker Percy, Obl.S.B. (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was a Southern author from Covington, Louisiana, whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, ''The Moviegoer'', won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.〔 He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age."〔Kimball, Roger. ( Existentialism, Semiotics and Iced Tea, Review of Conversations with Walker Percy ) New York Times, August 4, 1985. Retrieved 2010-06-12.〕 His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. ==Biography== Percy was born in 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, as the first of three boys to LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan Phinizy. His father's Mississippi Protestant family included his uncle LeRoy Percy, a U.S. Senator, and LeRoy Pope Percy, a Civil War hero. In February 1917, Percy's grandfather committed suicide. This seemed to set a family pattern of emotional struggle and deaths that would haunt Percy throughout his life. In 1929, when Percy was 13, his father committed suicide.〔 His mother took the family to live at her own mother's home in Athens, Georgia. Two years later, Percy's mother died when she drove a car off a country bridge and into Deer Creek near Leland, Mississippi, where they were visiting. Percy regarded this death as another suicide.〔Samway, Patrick. ''Walker Percy: A Life''. (Loyola Press USA, 1999) p. 4〕 Walker and his two younger brothers, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin), were taken in by their second cousin William Alexander Percy, a bachelor lawyer and poet in Greenville, Mississippi. Percy was raised as an agnostic, though he was nominally affiliated with a theologically liberal Presbyterian church.〔O'Gorman, Farrell. (Extract from "Walker Percy, the Catholic Church and Southern race relations (ca. 1947–1970)" ), ''The Mississippi Quarterly'', Winter, 1999/2000.〕 William Percy introduced him to many writers and poets, and to a neighboring youth his own age, Shelby Foote, who became his lifelong best friend.〔Elie, Paul (2003). ''The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage'', Farrar, Straus & Giroux.〕 As young men, Percy and Foote decided to pay their respects to William Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi. But when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak to him. He later recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch. Percy attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he joined the Xi chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He received a medical degree from Columbia University in New York City in 1941.〔 There he had psychotherapy to deal with the legacy of suicides and depression in his family. After contracting tuberculosis while performing an autopsy at Bellevue Hospital Center, Percy spent several years recuperating at the Trudeau Sanitorium in Saranac Lake, New York. At the time, there was no known treatment for TB other than rest. During this period, Percy read the works of the Danish existentialist writer Søren Kierkegaard and the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. He began to question the ability of science to explain the basic mysteries of human existence. He was influenced by the example of one of his college roommates, and began to rise daily at dawn and go to Mass.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Walker Percy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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