Major works:
The Moviegoer • The Last Gentleman • Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World
“[The Moviegoer] is a distinctly American novel, but one that stands apart from the main line from Hawthorne to Twain to James and Wharton and then to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Cather—the double helix of innocents at home and innocents abroad. Its key antecedents are the European existentialists Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus.”
—Paul Elie
“Percy was, essentially, a philosopher. . . . An overabundance of daily choice paralyzes the will of Percy’s characters. Minute decisions become indistinguishable from the major questions of how and why. For Percy, all options lurk about all the time and the soul recoils from this infinitely sprawling dichotomous key of doors ajar.”
—Spencer Woodman, The Paris Review
Books
