Walker Percy

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Walker Percy

Walker Percy (born May 28, 1916 in Birmingham , Alabama ; died May 10, 1990 in Covington , Louisiana ) was an American writer.

Life

Walker Percy grew up with his two brothers with his cousin William Alexander Percy in Greenville, Mississippi . He lost his parents early: his father died by suicide when Percy was thirteen, and two years later his mother broke through the railing of a bridge in a car and was killed in the process. Officially declared an accident, Walker Percy believed this incident to be another suicide. His grandfather had already committed suicide before Percy was born. Another cousin is William Armstrong Percy .

Walker Percy studied chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . After graduating in 1937, he studied medicine at Columbia University in New York , where he received his license to practice medicine in 1941 and henceforth worked as a pathologist. In 1942 he was infected with tuberculosis during an autopsy and had to give up his medical profession for a few years. During the subsequent stay in a sanatorium, he dealt with philosophical and religious questions, read a lot, decided to write himself and converted to the Catholic Church. In 1946 he married Mary Bernice Townsend; Percy and his wife adopted a girl and had a birth daughter. In 1950 he settled in Covington, Louisiana . He lived there until his death from cancer in 1990. One of Percy's friends was the novelist and historian Shelby Foote .

plant

Before his conversion to Catholicism in 1947, he dealt intensively with the philosophers Sören Kierkegaard and Charles Sanders Peirce . Percy's first publications include specialized philosophical articles, especially on the theory of signs. Kierkegaard's existential philosophy is particularly influential in Percy's first novel, Kinogeher ; the discussion with Peirce runs through his essays (collected in Message in the Bottle and Signposts in a Strange Land ), his ironic-time-critical book Lost in the Cosmos , but also through his novel Die Wiederkehr . Although he barely suggests his religious stance in his first film, Der Kinogeher , it becomes clearly recognizable in his later novels (especially Love in Ruins and Thanatos Syndrome ). In a strong ironic refraction, however, Percy avoids a preaching tone, here with an explicit reference to Kierkegaard.

His criticism of the American present, particularly clearly in the novels Lancelot , Love in Ruins and Thanatos Syndrome , he intensifies with apocalyptic undertones. A characteristic of his prose is the reference to southern American society ; Percy is in the neighborhood of William Faulkner , who, along with Anton Chekhov and Dostoevsky , strongly influenced him. After Faulkner's death, Percy became the literary voice of the South. When asked why the south produced so many important writers, he replied with the now famous saying “Because we got beat” - “Because we were beaten” / “Because we have beat ”.

In essays and lectures, he devoted himself to the American southern states, their history and culture, the role of the writer as a diagnosis of the times, the threat to man from technological progress and - in a famous text - bourbon .

In 1962 he won the National Book Award with his first novel Der Kinogeher . In 1972 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Works

German Der Kinogeher , translated by Peter Handke , ISBN 3-518-01903-1 . New edition 2016: ISBN 978-3-518-22494-6 .
German The Idiot of the South , ISBN 3-518-03227-5
German love in ruins , ISBN 3-518-37114-2
  • The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (Essays, 1975), ISBN 0-312-25401-6
dt. Are you a Catholic? (contains 2 essays from The Message in the Bottle and two previously unpublished interviews), ISBN 3-88567-082-8
German Lancelot , ISBN 3-426-00802-5
dt. Die Wiederkehr , continuation of Der Idiot des Südens , ISBN 3-518-40137-8
dt. The hole in the cosmos. The Search for a Universal Spirituality , ISBN 3-453-14667-0
German The Thanatos Syndrome , continuation of love in ruins , ISBN 3-446-15067-6

Secondary literature

  • Harold Bloom , ed. Modern Critical Views: Walker Percy . Chelsea House, New York 1986.
  • Jan Nordby Gretlund, Karl-Heinz Westarp (eds.): Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 1991.

Biographies

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Walker Percy. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 19, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Percy, Walker
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 28, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Birmingham , Alabama
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1990
Place of death Covington , Louisiana