Walker Percy’s novels are the artistic play of a disciplined intellectual with wide spread scientific and philosophical knowlege. A friend from youth of the novelist and historian Shelby Foote, Percy was raised largely in the family of his uncle, William Alexander Percy, whose Lanterns on the Levee: Memoirs of a Planter’s Son (1941) captures the intellectual life of a genteel, romantic, public-minded, scholarly, culturally conservative white Southerner, an outspoken opponent of the Ku Klux Klan and of racist violence (but not of racial segregation) such as Faulkner had portrayed in Gavin Stevens. Percy remembered his “Uncle Will” with affection, but he was also acutely aware of the limitations of the cast of mind his uncle represented and could not bring himself to rely on the mixture of secular traditionalism and fatalism (held in check by noblesse oblige) his uncle lived by.

Percy’s original interests were scientific and medical, leading him to study chemistry at the University of North Carolina and to earn his medical degree from Columbia University in 1941. He also had, during this period, a deep intellectual investment in psychoanalysis, undergoing three years of analysis while in medical school. All of this changed when, during his residency as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital, he contracted tuberculosis from an autopsy patient, and, quarantined for an extended period, began a serious course of philosophical and religious study. The ultimate fruits of this study were his return to the South (he lived in Covington, Louisiana, for most of his life), and his conversion to Roman Cathlicism.