| Walker Percy |
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Percy attended college at University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill and later trained as a Medical Doctor at Columbia University , receiving his medical degree in 1941 . He married Mary Bernice Townsend on November 7 , 1946 , and they raised their two daughters in Covington, Louisiana . Although a prolific essayist, Percy is best known for his " Philosophical Novel s", the first of which, '' The Moviegoer '', won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962 . Percy died of Prostate Cancer in 1990 . Both Walker Percy and his best friend Shelby Foote greatly admired William Faulkner . As young men, Percy and Foote decided to pay their respects to Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi. But Percy stood in awe of the literary giant and when, one afternoon, they finally drove up to Faulkner's home, Walker Percy could not bring himself to talk to Faulkner. He could only sit in the car, watching Shelby Foote and William Faulkner have a lively conversation on the porch. Percy was instrumental in getting John Kennedy Toole 's Pulitzer Prize winning novel '' A Confederacy Of Dunces '' published in 1980 , over a decade after Toole's tragic Suicide . PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY Novels
Nonfiction
OUTSIDE READING Wyatt-Brown, Bertram ''House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family.'' Oxford University Press USA, 1996. |
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