Embodying both good and great

Today is the 100th birthday of Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). He was orphaned as a boy by his parents' suicides: when Percy was 13, his father shot himself; his mother drove her car off a bridge two years later. Percy's older cousin - a poet and essayist - adopted him, along with his two younger brothers, and took them to live in Greenville, Mississippi. In Greenville, Percy met the neighbor boy, Shelby Foote. As teenagers they took a trip to Oxford to meet their hero, William Faulkner. Percy was overwhelmed and awestruck, and he lost his nerve; he stayed in the car as Foote and Faulkner talked on the porch. Percy and Foote would remain close friends for 60 years; Percy loaned Foote money so that he could complete his trilogy about the Civil War.

Percy studied medicine and earned his M.D. at Columbia University. His plan was to be a psychiatrist. He was doing an internship at New York's Bellevue Hospital when he contracted tuberculosis. He spent two years in various sanatoriums, and spent much of that time reading. He particularly read Russian and European novels with strong psychological underpinnings, books by Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard. Contracting TB was, he later said, "the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me a chance to quit medicine. I had a respectable excuse." When he was released from the sanatorium, he returned home to the South to become a writer.

At first, he wrote and published some philosophical essays in magazines. He later told the Paris Review: "You can't make a living writing articles for The Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The thought crossed my mind: Why not do what French philosophers often do and Americans almost never - novelize philosophy, incarnate ideas in a person and a place, which latter is, after all, a noble Southern tradition in fiction." For 10 years he worked on a novel, and then a second, neither of which was ever published. In the mid-1950s, he began writing what would become his first published novel:The Moviegoer (1961). It's about a stockbroker who is recovering from a nervous breakdown, and spends all his time at the movies. Percy was 45 when it was published, and it went on to win the National Book Award. He wrote and published five more novels after that, but The Moviegoer is still his most famous.

He never fully abandoned his interest in psychiatry, but rather translated it into his approach to fiction. He told Paris Review: "What interests me as a novelist is not the malevolence of man- so what else is new? - but his looniness. The looniness, that is to say, of the 'normal' denizen of the Western world who, I think it fair to say, doesn't know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing."

Or, as his character Binx Bolling, the narrator of The Moviegoer, says: "The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."