沃克·柏西

沃克·柏西（Walker Percy，1916年—1990年），美国作家，代表作是《影迷》，曾入选20世纪百大英文小说。

Walker Percy, OblSB (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American writer whose works explored alienation, existentialism, faith, and the limits of science in modern life. A prominent Southern and Catholic literary figure, Percy is especially noted for his novels set in New Orleans. His first, The Moviegoer (1961), won the National Book Award for Fiction.

Both of Percy's parents died in likely suicides, and he was raised by his lawyer and poet cousin William Alexander Percy in Mississippi. Percy studied chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received an M.D. from Columbia University in 1941, intending to become a psychiatrist. However, Percy contracted tuberculosis while interning at Bellevue Hospital in 1942 and spent years at sanatoriums like the Trudeau Sanatorium. During his convalescence, Percy read the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Jean-Paul Sartre and started to question science's ability to explain human existence. He began attending daily Mass and converted to Catholicism in 1947.

Percy's literary career was launched with a 1956 essay attacking segregation, published in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. His debut novel The Moviegoer was followed by The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). He also wrote nonfiction on semiotics and existentialism, including The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos (1983).

Percy spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana and had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote. Percy also taught at Loyola University New Orleans and was instrumental in the 1980 publication of A Confederacy of Dunces, a decade after the suicide of its author John Kennedy Toole. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker died of prostate cancer in 1990, shortly after becoming a Benedictine oblate.

Early life and education

Percy was born on May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama, the first of three boys to LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan Phinizy. His father's Mississippi Protestant family included his great-uncle LeRoy Percy, a US senator, and LeRoy Pope Walker, a pro-slavery secessionist in Antebellum America and the first Confederate States Secretary of War during the American Civil War. In February 1917, Percy's grandfather died by suicide.

In 1929, when Percy was 13, his father died by suicide. His mother took the family to live at her own mother's home in Athens, Georgia. Two years later, Percy's mother died in a suspected suicide when she drove a car off a country bridge and into Deer Creek near Leland, Mississippi, where they were visiting. Percy regarded this death as another suicide. Walker and his two younger brothers, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin), were taken in by their first cousin once removed, William Alexander Percy, a bachelor lawyer and poet living in Greenville, Mississippi.

Percy was raised as an agnostic, but he was nominally affiliated with a theologically liberal Presbyterian church. William Percy introduced him to many writers and poets.

Percy attended Greenville High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in chemistry and joined the Xi chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He wrote essays and book reviews for the school's Carolina Magazine. He graduated with a B.A. in 1937.

Friendship with Shelby Foote

After moving to Greenville, Mississippi, in 1930, Shelby Foote became Percy's lifelong best friend. As young men, Percy and Foote decided to visit William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi. However, when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak. Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation.