NEW ORLEANS From Bienville to Bourbon Street to bounce. 300 moments that make New Orleans unique.
WHAT HAPPENED Walker 1718 ~ 2018 Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer,’ was published 300 n 1961. TRICENTENNIAL
Walker Percy was a writer who refused to be defined. Yet his work, specifically “The Moviegoer,” defined what many in the world thought of New Orleans. A first edition of ‘The Percy, who lived in New Orleans for a short time Moviegoer,’ which was and then in Covington for 40 years, eschewed published in 1961. It won a National Book descriptions of him as a “Catholic” or “Southern” Award in 1962. writer. Yet he was called both the best Southern and best Catholic writer of the time. Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and spent his adolescence in Greenville, Mississippi. Though he studied A sculpture of Walker medicine, a diagnosis of tuberculosis set him on Percy by Covington a different path. He read European existentialists, sculptor Bill Binning commissioned by the especially Kierkegaard, during his convalescence. Public Art for Covington When he recovered, he moved to New Orleans. He Fund. THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE ORLEANS NEW THE decided to take the ideas he’d learned in his study of psychiatry and in his reading and translate them into a fictional novel. He set the novel “The Mov- iegoer” in post-war New Orleans. The novel won a National Book Award for fiction and was Percy’s most popular work. After “The Moviegoer,” Percy’s novels included “The Last Gentleman”(1966), “Love in the Ruins” (1971), “Lancelot” (1977), “The Second Coming” (1980) and “The Thanatos Syndrome” (1987). Per- cy also taught at Louisiana State University and Loyola University. While at Loyola, John Kennedy Toole’s mother, Thelma Toole, approached Percy with the unpublished “ A Confederacy of Dunces.” The novel had been rejected by eight publishers when Toole killed himself in 1969. Percy helped get the novel published in 1980, and it won the Pulitzer Walker Percy in his Covington yard in 1977.
Prize in 1981. Percy died in 1990. PRESS ASSOCIATED