Revisiting Walker Percy Thru Emory

Sometimes what we choose to read at a particular time comes from the unlikeliest sources. Case in point, I'm finishing up a read of Walker Percy's 1971 apocalyptic, satirical novel, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. Though I am already familiar with Percy's work (The Moviegoer, Lancelot and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self Help Book) what motivated me to dig up my disintegrating paperback copy (shown) is that the Emory Center for Lifelong Learning is offering a six week course on the book beginning on February 10th (See here for details). The course catalog arrived in the mail last month.

If I had the time and money I'd take the course, but I will have to be content in just reading the book and looking over some sources already at my disposal. Here's a few things I like about Percy and his work:

Percy (1916-1990) did not publish his first book until he was 45 years old and it (The Moviegoer) won the National Book Award, which gives hope to any writer in their 40s who hasn't published yet.
Percy was responsible for bringing John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces to print after Toole had died. Again, reinforcing the romantic notion that unpublished writers may eventually get their material published – – even if it is posthumously,.
Percy's fiction is ( in his own words), “a philosophical conviction with novelistic art," which means the narrators speak intellectually over social issues. (In Ruins, a troubled physician Thomas More — named after the 16th century lawyer and philosopher opines about race relations (in language that readers must put in the proper context), the death of the Auto Age, American imperialism, and religion.
Percy's narrator reminds me a lot of Richard Ford's narrator Frank Bascombe of Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, two of my favorite books.
Percy is worthy of an entry in David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Thomson writes, “The movies owe much to novelists. Dickens, Conan Doyle, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, Mario Puzo to name some notable examples, have provided inspiration, direction, material. Moviegoing owes a similar debt to just one novelist. Percy's first and best novel, The Moviegoer...”