Still Following Percy

When critics first began to respond to the fiction of Walker Percy, they frequently refarded it as a fiction of ideas. The most significant themes were Percy's religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs. Such conceptions of the man were grounded in his own essays, a genre which in his hands tended toward the impersonal and the abstract.

In time Percy critics like William Rodney Allen began to prove into Percy's biography for resources that verified their intense critical speculations about the background of Percy's fiction. In his childhood was his father's suicide and its significant emergence in his fiction. Percy's biographers have continued this investigation of the father's influence. Jay Tolson deftly represent the theme of the paternal death as a vacuum Percy felt throughout his life, while Bertram Wyatt-Brown studied the Percy family ethos, which he showed to be shadowed for two hundred years by high expectations, depression, and self-destruction.

Now, in Still Fol