Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Cindy Montgomery Webb <cgmwebb AT gmail.com>]

Re: John Riley's question about the Percy documentary.  The 2010 film is now available on DVD.  The documentary contains some insightful interviews with Percy scholars (i.e. Linda Whitney Hobson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Jay Tolson, Paul Elie) and Percy's fellow writers and friends (Richard Ford, Ben Toledano, respectively).  Much of the film considers Percy's personal life and shows how these events connect to his writing.  Percy's haunting childhood and experiences gained while living with uncle William Alexander Percy segue into Walker's own considerations of honor and tradition in later writings. His teenage and adult adventures with Shelby Foote include an excursion to Santa Fe as "the land of pure possibility," a place not weighed down by a sense of history, which Percy addressed in The Last Gentleman. Percy's experience of being "trapped" into the Southern writer label is also developed in the documentary as are discussions of philosophical, religious, and semantic concerns throughout his career.  The documentary seemed a bit short at only sixty minutes long, but that lends itself well to instructional use. I would say that it presents a good range of Percy's concerns in writing and in life and offers a strong introduction, or even synopsis, of his work in interesting ways.

A short preview of the film and more information can be found at: http://www.walkerpercymovie.com/watchashortprevi.html

-Cindy Montgomery Webb

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Dept. of English

PhD candidate