The author is particularly well qualified to evaluate novelist Walker Percy's philosophical interests and 1947 conversion to Catholicism: Patrick Samway, a Jesuit priest, edited a volume of Percy's uncollected essays and another of his correspondence on the subject of American semiotician Charles Sanders Pierce. Although he knew Percy (1916-90) personally in his final years, Samway maintains a scholarly distance in this meticulously researched biography. It does not supplant Jay Tolson's more passionate 1992 assessment, but offers a valuable additional perspective.


From Library Journal
Eudora Welty said at the memorial service for Percy (1916-90) that "the physician's ear and the writer's ear are pressed alike to the human chest." What Percy heard there often caused despair, which in turn influenced his writing. Trained as a doctor, Percy never practiced medicine. Recuperating from tuberculosis, he began to think about writing professionally, which resulted in five novels, three books of nonfiction, and many essays. In this excellent biography, Samway, the editor of Percy's uncollected essays (Signposts in a Strange Land, LJ 7/91), reveals Percy to be a writer of great passion and intellect. Through a writing program, Samway got to know Percy just before his death and was apparently granted full cooperation by him and his family and friends. He traces through Percy's writing the currents of Kierkegaard, regionalism, medicine, Catholicism, and the irrational nature of human happiness. A fascinating study; for all literature collections.?Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Robert Coles
By setting clear limits on his authorial role, by attempting to evoke through letters and interviews and a weighty factuality the various worlds Walker Percy inhabited, explored and tried to evoke for others in his writing, Father Samway brings his narrative to full life.


From Booklist
"He often maintained that one of the hardest moments in life was to get through those ordinary Wednesday afternoons," relates Samway, in speaking of southern novelist Walker Percy. That kind of unpretentious wisdom about existence, morality, and religion permeated Percy's fiction and made him a favorite among discriminating readers. Percy graduated from medical school but refrained from further involvement in the profession after contracting tuberculosis. He turned to writing--not unexpectedly, given that he had made his writing debut as a schoolboy--but a long apprenticeship preceded his entry into the world of mature fiction. Samway discusses Percy's conversion to Catholicism and its resonant effect on his worldview and thus on his writing. Although not prolific, Percy composed sterling works. He died in 1990 of prostate cancer, and this biography may well remain the standard one for years, for Samway's treatment is not only comprehensive but also productively, sensitively critical in terms of both Percy's character and his artistry. Brad Hooper


From Kirkus Reviews
Samway, who edited Signposts in a Strange Land, Percy's posthumously published essays, successfully triangulates the major forces unifying Percy's life (191690): a complex mix of Catholic faith, existential angst, and scientific method. Percy spent his childhood in Greenville, Miss., raised by his uncle, the poet Will Percy, after the suicide of both parents. He began writing early, as a gossip columnist for his high school newspaper, but later turned to medicine, seeking a scientific discipline to bring order to his chaotic life. Stricken with tuberculosis while serving a residency at New York's Bellevue hospital, Percy spent several years recovering in a sanitarium. There he began reading philosophy and identified the central irony in his life: Science, despite unraveling the workings of the human body and the universe, ultimately knows nothing about the mystery of human existence, ``what it is like to be a man living in the world who must die.'' To explore that mystery Percy turned to fiction, which he considered a means of applying the scientific method to the study of the self. Though best known for novels of alienation, including his 1962 National Book Awardwinning The Moviegoer, Percy felt his essays on semiotics (the study of ``why people talk and animals don't,'' as he joked to longtime friend Shelby Foote) were his most important work. Despite considerable efforts to explain them, Percy's difficult language theories here remain obtuse. Samway, a Jesuit and close friend of Percy's, is more adept at illuminating the writer's midlife conversion to Catholicism, insightfully tracing the influence of this sustaining religious faith on his fiction--a connection Percy felt too few readers made. He believed The Moviegoer was misunderstood as ``a novel of despair, rather than a novel about despair but with hope.'' Such crucial distinctions make this an essential critical companion to Percy's work, though the respectful tone mutes Percy's darker side--the malevolent irony and wicked satire so integral to his novels. (photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When he won the National Book Award in 1962 for his first novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy quickly established a wide and devoted following. Trained as a physician (who never practiced medicine after suffering from tuberculosis in the 1940s), Dr. Percy became a careful diagnostician of modern society in five subsequent novels and three non-fiction books. This biography, written with Percy's approval and assistance, allows his life to unfold as he lived it, with its unexpected twists and complexities. The tragic deaths of his father and mother, different in manner but close in time, were traumatic events for their teenage son. His subsequent adoption by "Uncle Will - William Alexander Percy, the noted writer and patrician - extended his cultural horizons. After his studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Columbia University's School of Medicine, he married Mary Bernice Townsend. Patrick Samway's meticulous biography tracks their conversion to Roman Catholicism and Percy's dogged determination to continue his career as a novelist and semiotician in Covington, Louisiana.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

When Walker Percy introduced himself as a writer to students at a Roman Catholic seminary, he told them, "It's a tough way to make a living." Dollars had nothing to do with it in his case, however: his adoptive father had left him a bundle. Although Percy won the National Book Award in 1962, beating out Catch-22as well as fiction by Salinger, Singer and Malamudin more than 30 years of writing novels, he completed only six. Except for his inheritance, life had been unkind to Percy. Both his father and mother had committed suicide when Percy was a schoolboy in Mississippi. His career as a physician ended early and abruptly when he contracted tuberculosis from his patients, and his recovery was slow and uncertain. Percy's creative clock also ran slowly, and his interest in fiction was often eclipsed by his interest in Existentialism and Catholicism, to which he became a converta dimension of his life that is given much space by Samway, a Jesuit priest who became Percy's authorized biographer and edited his uncollected essays as Signposts in a Strange Land (1991). Samway skirts Percy's emotional and imaginative beingthe impact of the deaths of his parents, his relationships with his brothers and with his bachelor-poet Uncle Will (the boys' second father), his marital life with "Bunt" and his hinted-at extramarital temptations. Percy's long life (1916-1990) is approached rather doggedly on its surface, yet the likely torment in his aesthetic and spiritual pilgrimage is the part of Percy's life that escapes. Illustrations not seen by PW. (May)

Library Journal

Eudora Welty said at the memorial service for Percy (1916-90) that "the physician's ear and the writer's ear are pressed alike to the human chest." What Percy heard there often caused despair, which in turn influenced his writing. Trained as a doctor, Percy never practiced medicine. Recuperating from tuberculosis, he began to think about writing professionally, which resulted in five novels, three books of nonfiction, and many essays. In this excellent biography, Samway, the editor of Percy's uncollected essays (Signposts in a Strange Land, LJ 7/91), reveals Percy to be a writer of great passion and intellect. Through a writing program, Samway got to know Percy just before his death and was apparently granted full cooperation by him and his family and friends. He traces through Percy's writing the currents of Kierkegaard, regionalism, medicine, Catholicism, and the irrational nature of human happiness. A fascinating study; for all literature collections.-Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.

Booknews

American novelist Percy (1916-90) approved the biography and helped unfold the unexpected twists and complexities of his life. They include early family tragedies, studies that led him to Columbia's School of Medicine, marriage, conversion to Roman Catholicism, a 1962 National Book Award for his first novel , and his insistence on living and writing in Louisiana. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

Kirkus Reviews

Samway, who edited Signposts in a Strange Land, Percy's posthumously published essays, successfully triangulates the major forces unifying Percy's life (1916-90): a complex mix of Catholic faith, existential angst, and scientific method.

Percy spent his childhood in Greenville, Miss., raised by his uncle, the poet Will Percy, after the suicide of both parents. He began writing early, as a gossip columnist for his high school newspaper, but later turned to medicine, seeking a scientific discipline to bring order to his chaotic life. Stricken with tuberculosis while serving a residency at New York's Bellevue hospital, Percy spent several years recovering in a sanitarium. There he began reading philosophy and identified the central irony in his life: Science, despite unraveling the workings of the human body and the universe, ultimately knows nothing about the mystery of human existence, "what it is like to be a man living in the world who must die." To explore that mystery Percy turned to fiction, which he considered a means of applying the scientific method to the study of the self. Though best known for novels of alienation, including his 1962 National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer, Percy felt his essays on semiotics (the study of "why people talk and animals don't," as he joked to longtime friend Shelby Foote) were his most important work. Despite considerable efforts to explain them, Percy's difficult language theories here remain obtuse. Samway, a Jesuit and close friend of Percy's, is more adept at illuminating the writer's midlife conversion to Catholicism, insightfully tracing the influence of this sustaining religious faith on his fiction—a connection Percy felt too few readers made. He believed The Moviegoer was misunderstood as "a novel of despair, rather than a novel about despair but with hope."

Such crucial distinctions make this an essential critical companion to Percy's work, though the respectful tone mutes Percy's darker side—the malevolent irony and wicked satire so integral to his novels.