Dr. Tom More Books In Publication Order
- Love in the Ruins (1971)
- The Thanatos Syndrome (1987)
Will Barrett Books In Publication Order
- The Last Gentleman (1966)
- The Second Coming (1980)
Standalone Novels In Publication Order
- The Moviegoer (1961)
- Lancelot (1977)
- Diagnosing the Modern Malaise (1985)
Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order
- The Message in the Bottle (1975)
- Lost in the Cosmos (1983)
- Conversations with Walker Percy (1985)
- State of the Novel (1987)
- Signposts in a Strange Land (1991)
- More Conversations with Walker Percy (1993)
- Symbol and Existence (With: ) (2019)
Dr. Tom More Book Covers
Will Barrett Book Covers
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Non-Fiction Book Covers
Walker Percy Books Overview
Love in the Ruins
Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument the Ontological Lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind’s spiritual flu. Though scorned by the experts, Tom embarks on an outrageous odyssey to prove himself. Attempting to save the world from destruction, Tom ultimately begins to understand what he can never really know the quality and caprices of life and the uncontrollable vagaries of time and chance.
The Thanatos Syndrome
Returning home to the small Louisiana parish where he had praticed psychiatry, Dr. Tom More quickly notices something strange occuring with the townfolk, a loss of inhibitions. Behind this mystery is a dangerous plot drug the local water supply, and a discovery that takes More into the underside of the American search for happiness.
The Last Gentleman
‘The Last Gentleman is lovely and brilliant…
a highly whimsical kind of picaresque tale that puts one in mind of both Faulkner and Camus,’ wrote Joyce Carol Oates when Walker Percy’s novel was first published in 1966. Williston Bibb Barrett, The Last Gentleman of the story, is a displaced Southerner who has dropped out of Princeton owing to a nervous condition that his psychoanalyst associates with an inability to fit into groups. While living in New York City, our wayfarer hero falls in love with a young woman he spies through a telescope…
and sets out on a cross country odyssey in search of home, identity, and the meaning of contemporary life. ‘The Last Gentleman is a fantastically intuitive report on how America feels to the touch,’ said Wilfrid Sheed. ‘Page for page and line for line this is certainly one of the best written books in recent memory. As a Southern writer, Percy inherits the remains of a sonorous musical language. But beyond that, his unique point of view forms beautiful sentences like a diamond cutting glass.’ Alfred Kazin agreed: ‘Percy is a natural writer, downright, subtle, mischievous…
a philosopher among novelists.’ With a new Introduction by Robert Coles. The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford able hardbound editions of impor tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoringas its emblem the running torch bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.
The Second Coming
Will Barrett also the hero of Percy’s The Last Gentleman is a lonely widower suffering from a depression so severe that he decides he doesn’t want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself in a greenhouse. The Second Coming is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will sets out in search of God’s existence and winds up finding much more.
The Moviegoer
Winner of the 1961 National Book AwardThe dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southernliterature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback. The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world withthe detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption hecannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupieshimself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the’treasurable moments’ absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarkson a hare brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, andsends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans’ French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, richin irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.
Lancelot
‘A modern knight errant on a quest after evil…
Convincing and chilling.’ The New York Times Book ReviewLancelot Andrewes Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a ‘nuthouse’ with memories that don’t seem worth remembering until a visit from an old friend and classmate gives him the opportunity to recount his journey of dark violence. It began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter. That discovery touched off his obsession to reverse the degeneration of modern America and begin a new age of chivalry and romance. With ever increasing fury, Lancelot would become a shining knight not of romance, but of revenge…
The Message in the Bottle
In Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy offers insights on such varied yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, Helen Keller, Semioticism, and the incredible Delta Factor. Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist’s eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us.
Lost in the Cosmos
Walker Percy’s mordantly funny and wholly original contribution to the self help book craze deals with the Western mind’s tendency toward heavy abstraction. This favorite of Percy fans continues to charm and beguile readers of all tastes and backgrounds. Lost in the Cosmos invites us to think about how we communicate with our world.
Conversations with Walker Percy
These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close up encounters with one of America’s most celebrated writers. These twenty seven interviews cover a period of twenty two years, from the time of the publication of Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961, until 1983, when he was interviewed about his friendship with Thomas Merton. This volume is the second in the Literary Conversations series. These unabridged interviews, collected from a variety of sources, will give reading pleasure to general readers who wish to know Percy and his works more closely, and they will be of great use to Percy scholars.
Signposts in a Strange Land
At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.
More Conversations with Walker Percy
This collection of interviews supplements Conversations with Walker Percy and occasions an additional two dozen pleasurable encounters with Percy. Primarily from the last ten years of Percy’s life, they show how his presence was stimulating thought in much of humanistic America, in literature, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and in cultural life in general. Although this acclaimed author of The Moviegoer, Lancelot, and Love in the Ruins never overcame his shyness with interviewers, he continued to grant interviews as long as his health permitted. This act of openness illustrates his humility before his ideas and his desire to help others understand them. The interviews in this collection show him at a height when he knew that his illness would not allow him to write any more books, and that the only way to restate his ideas and offer a valediction to the large audience to whom he had always been kind, patient, and appreciative was to speak out. Percy despised the posture of many modern self proclaimed intellectuals who delight in cloaking ideas in jargon and abstraction. He always tried to express himself clearly and as free of reservations as possible. These interviews reflect that clarity.
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