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  • From: John Pearson <jp AT jlarsp.com>
  • To: percy list <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy before Walker Percy (short essay)
  • Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2019 09:25:40 -0600

I also had the same thought. I have to believe that if there was a new understanding of the historical evidence, someone on this list would know about it. I thought about emailing Casey McCorry to ask her, but I didn’t see an email link on the page. My guess is that it is a short piece and this was an easy shorthand way of addressing the issue without having more space to go into detail. (I just hope this doesn’t lead to others quoting McCorry as evidence that both Percy’s parents committed suicide.)

John

On Feb 24, 2019, at 10:12 PM, RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com> wrote:

Chuck, I had the very same thought. It seemed there was a bit of editorializing going on there, a bit of working the edges of the facts to present a particular view. But perhaps that was just me overreacting. 

Rhonda

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 24, 2019, at 8:44 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: 






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