BIOGRAPHY

Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 28 May 1916. When his father, lawyer Leroy Percy, committed suicide on 9 July 1929, the widow and her three sons moved to Greenville, Mississippi, where they lived with Leroy's bachelor cousin, William Alexander Percy. Then, William Alexander Percy adopted the boys in 1931, following their mother's death in an automobile accident. William Alexander Percy provided Walker with a means of ameliorating, the burden of his Southern past by introducing him to art. Besides, William Alexander Percy was known as the author of several works, including an autobiographical memoir of the South entitled Lanterns on the Levee (1941).

In the early 1930's, Percy attended Greenville High School, where he wrote a gossip column and became the close friend of Shelby Foote, who was committed to a literary career. At the University of North Carolina, which was noted for its school of behaviorism, Percy majored in Chemistry and received a B.S. in 1937. He then enrolled in Columbia's college of Physicians and Surgeon (M.D., 1941), where in addition to his studies, Percy underwent psychoanalysis and became frequent moviegoer. The turning point in his life came in early 1942, when as a resident at Bellevue Hospital in New York, Percy was contracted tuberculosis. As a working pathologist in New York, Percy was called upon perform autopsies on indigent alcoholics, many of whom died of tuberculosis. Within a year Percy contracted the dreaded lung disease himself; he spent most of the following three years in a sanatorium. During his two-year convalescence at Saranac Lake, he began reading extensively in French and Russia literature, philosophy and psychology, such as Sartre, Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Fyodor Dostoevski, Nicolai Gogol, Leo Tostoy and Franz Kafka. In 1944, Percy had recovered sufficiently to return to Columbia to teach pathology, but he suffered relapse and decided to quit medicine. The illness was somewhat fortuitous, because Percy had become deeply interested in a whole realm of intellectual endeavor. Percy first published works were philosophical essays that appeared in scholarly journals; these essays dealt with self- estrangement in the twentieth century, its causes and ramification. Having married in 1946 and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1947, Percy and his wife moved to New Orleans and then to Covington, Lousiana, living on an inheritance from a relative. When one of his children was born deaf, a branch of philosophy that has consumed him ever since- semiotics, the study of symbols and how they are used in human communication fascinated Percy. Percy wrote two unpublished novels before beginning The Moviegoer. The Moviegoer was published in 1961 when Percy was forty five, and although the publisher, Albert A. Knopf, did a little to promote the book, it was discovered and accorded the National Book Award in 1962 (National Book Award was established in 1950 by the Association of American Publishers , the American Booksellers Association, and the Book Manufactures Institute. The $1000 awards were established to give recognition to the most distinguished books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry of the previous year.); his most recent novel, The Second Coming, won the first Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction. Among his other literary honors are memberships in the National Institute of Arts, and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Walker Percy was died of cancer in May 1990, and left two children, Ann Boyd and Mary Pratt. SYNOPSIS

Binx Boiling who is almost thirty years old, a Korean

War veteran, lived in Gentilly, a middle class suburb of

New Orleans. Binx Boiling is a successful stockbroker and handsome. He worked for his Uncle Jules Cutrer in the suburban office of the firm. But his family was somewhat disappointed in his choice of profession. His aunt, Emily raised Binx, after his father had committed suicide. His mother was remarried and lived on the Gulf Coast where her husband is a Western auto dealer. Binx had six half- brothers and sisters named Smith, and his favorite half- brother is a fourteen-year old, Lonnie Smith.

Although financially secured, Binx felt uneasy, he had trouble living his own life from day to day, fearful that he may at any moment succumb to that worst of all plagues, the malaise, "the pain of loss", of

"everydayness". To counter its effects, Binx became a moviegoer, partly because movies project a reality.

Besides, Binx also pursues money and women, but the pursuit leads only to boredom and depression because the novelty of his possessions quickly wears off and everydayness inevitably returns to remind him of his inauthenticity.

According to Binx money is a great joy. Binx mother's opinion often told Binx to be unselfish, but in Binx's mind, he had become suspicious of the advice; thus, Binx done it for his own selfish reason. Then, Binx tries to overcome his problems by using what he calls the repetition and the rotation ways through his mother, his cousin, Kate Cutrer and his half-brother, Lonnie Smith. Finally, Binx realizes the depth of his despair on his birthday. Then, he decides listen to what people say, see how they stick themselves into world, and help people for his own good. Then, a little year latter, Binx's attending medical school, and he has married Kate Cutrer and remained faithful in caring for Kate. He has continued on the path of helping others and himself. He lives in the small and everyday ways that make his life bearable.