Walker Percy Musings
Don Erickson, an English teacher at Augustana, a top notch liberal arts college in Rock Island, Illinois, sent off a post card 20 years ago with just two sentences: "Read Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. I guarantee it." Guarantees are rare from a teacher, so we picked up on this and discovered Percy's half dozen novels are not only good stories but include some tempting philosophy and theology to boot. Ideas in novels usually don't work, but here they seem to. Percy's presentation of the idea of a "rotation" (a rotation is a fresh take on actuality) is especially fruitful and attractive. Rotations have been described in Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard, an importaut source for Walker Percy. Other philosophers are also underneath Percy — Heidegger, Sartre, Susan Langer (and her teacher, Ernst Cassirer). Many of these connections have been sorted out in Walker Percy, an American Search by Robert Coles. Percy's novels bring philosophy to life.
Percy died in 1990, To help promote his work the (virtual) literature department at Covenant Chris Craft University* will be sponsoring a page in Pietisten for the next year or so. Walker Percy Musings will be the page's title. It will feature articles and views of Percy's life and work. Covenant Chris Craft University is pleased to inaugurate this series with a review by Bob Elde of the recently published correspondence between Walker Percy and fellow Southern novelist, Shelby Foote. Elde, like Percy, has a background in the medical sciences and is presently the Dean of the College of Biological Sciences at the Universoty of Minnesota.
*situated between Fargo (cf. the movie) and Lake Wobegon on the shores of Bay Lake.