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

[Janet <honeyjbc AT gmail.com>]

That was always my impression as well. It was never asserted as fact

as far as I understood that his mother committed suicide, only that Walker Percy's history had lots of deaths in the family, some suicides included. The cause of his mother's death in the car was ambiguous.

On Feb 24, 2019 10:44 PM, Charles Lowry <lowry.charles AT gmail.com> wrote:

Ms. McCorry states as a quite ordinary fact that both of Percy’s parents committed suicide.  While the case of his father is clear, I have always thought that there was some ambiguity about the instance of his mother.  This is especially the case because of the presence of one of the boys in the car with her.

I am no scholar or academic, so it is entirely possible that I missed a consensus that formed without my participation.  When I first became interested in Percy, the conventional wisdom—I must have read it a dozen times, including in the standard biographies by Jay Tolson and Fr. Samway—was that his father was a suicide and his mother may or may not have committed suicide.  There are, I suppose, two questions: (1) Did Walker Percy himself ever express an opinion on the circumstances of his mother’s death?  (2) Is it now universally held that Walker Percy’s mother committed suicide?

Trying to keep up......

Chuck Lowry

Brooklyn, NY

On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 9:05 PM Henry P. Mills <wppdirector AT gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Percy-L, 

An interesting short read on the "need to hear about Walker Percy before he was Walker Percy." 

Best wishes, Henry Mills

--

An existentialist's companion: Walker Percy 

Casey McCorry, Angelus News  

Feb. 4, 2019

"Before Walker Percy was an award-winning author, before he was exploring the “dislocation of man in the modern age” or questioning southern sensibility in praise-garnering pages, he was a man not unlike many of us: wandering, depressed, studying for a career he didn’t want to have in the midst of a quarter-life crisis…"

continued at: 

https://angelusnews.com/news/casey-mccorry/an-existentialists-companion-walker-percy

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