Walker Percy was dying when he found life. Diagnosed with tuberculosis at twenty-six, the young medical doctor lay in a sanatorium in upstate New York, watching his carefully planned future dissolve. It was there, in that crucible of illness and enforced stillness, that he encountered the writings that would lead him to Christ and to his vocation as one of America's greatest Catholic novelists.
A Life Shadowed by Tragedy
Percy had grown up in a world of Southern privilege shadowed by tragedy. His father committed suicide when Walker was thirteen; his mother died in a car accident two years later. Raised by his cultured uncle William Alexander Percy in Greenville, Mississippi, Walker absorbed the stoic Southern tradition—noble in its way, but ultimately empty.
Walker Percy's Conversion Through Literature
At Saranac Lake sanatorium, unable to practice the medicine he had trained for at Columbia, Percy read voraciously. He encountered Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and the Catholic existentialists. "I gradually became aware," he later wrote, "that what the German philosophers were talking about... was nothing more nor less than the Christian gospel."
The conversion was intellectual but became personal. Percy was received into the Catholic Church in 1947, along with his wife Bunt. He would later describe his path as that of a "wayfarer"—someone searching, someone on pilgrimage.
From Doctor to Catholic Novelist
His first novel, "The Moviegoer" (1961), won the National Book Award and announced a major new voice in American letters. The protagonist Binx Bolling searches for meaning in the desacralized modern world: "The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life... To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something."
Percy's subsequent novels—"The Last Gentleman," "Love in the Ruins," "Lancelot," "The Second Coming," and "The Thanatos Syndrome"—all explore the spiritual condition of modern humanity. He diagnosed the malaise of affluent society with a physician's precision and offered the Christian message as the only adequate response.
"I am a Catholic," Percy stated simply, "but I am also a sinner." His faith was not triumphalist but realistic, acknowledging both the reality of grace and the persistence of human weakness. In his essays and interviews, he articulated how the Christian vision uniquely accounts for human existence—our grandeur and our misery.
The doctor who couldn't practice medicine became a novelist who healed souls.
