LOA LIVE
On 5/21, Walker Percy’s Timeless Novel of New Orleans
Faith, Fiction, and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
with Paul Elie and Ayana Mathis
Published in 1961, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer announced a major new voice in American fiction. In this lush, New Orleans–based novel, the forty-four-year-old doctor-turned-writer set out to explore what he called “the strange spiritual malady of the modern age.” What he gave us, says writer Paul Elie, editor of a new LOA edition of Percy’s novels, is “the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours.”
Join Elie, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and New York Times best-selling novelist Ayana Mathis (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie) for a conversation about faith, fiction, and the novel that established Percy as a peerless examiner of American alienation and redemption.
Tuesday, May 21
6:00–7:00 PM ET
This online event is free, but you must preregister to attend.
We thank our promotional partner: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers.
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer & Other Novels 1961-1971
Here for the first time in one volume are the three novels that cemented Walker Percy’s literary reputation. In The Moviegoer (1961), New Orleans stockbroker John Bickerson “Binx” Bolling finds respite from the quiet despair that dogs him in repeated visits to the cinema. During the week of Mardi Gras, he skips town with his troubled cousin Kate in a desperate bid to find transcendence.
The Last Gentleman (1966) centers another spiritual seeker, a Princeton-educated southerner working as a janitor who gets roped into a twisting cross-country odyssey with the dying heir to a wealthy family. And in Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (1971), Dr. Tom More, a descendent of Sir Thomas More, seeks to save a hopelessly divided America from itself with a strange invention he calls the “Ontological Lapsometer.”
Rounding out the volume are three short pieces by Percy, including his National Book Award acceptance speech for The Moviegoer, in which he reflects on his artistic aims, as well as a newly researched chronology of Percy’s life and career.
Banner Image: Downtown New Orleans in 1963 (Homini / CC BY 2.0), Paul Elie (Sue Jaye Johnson / The New York Times), Ayana Mathis (Beowulf Sheehan), and Walker Percy (University of Mississippi Library)
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