Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Mr. Percy is a breathtakingly brilliant writer." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Clothed in originality, intelligence, and a fierce regard for man's fate....Percy has a rare talent for making his people look and sound as though they were being seen and heard for the first time by anyone." Time
Review
"Percy remains one of our finest living writers, and his ethical concerns and philosophical depth put him in a class by himself." Robert Royal, National Review
Synopsis
Winner of the 1961 National Book Award The dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback.
The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.
About the Author
Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1937, and became a Doctor of Medicine at Columbia University in 1941. The Moviegoer, his first novel, was awarded the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction. Mr. Percy's other novels include The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), and two volumes of essays, The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983). Walker Percy died in 1990.