American novelist, essayist, and philosopher of language who arrived at fiction by an unusual route. Orphaned young and raised by a writer cousin in Mississippi, Percy trained as a physician at Columbia, contracted tuberculosis during his residency, and spent two years convalescing — during which he read Søren Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Marcel, and Albert Camus and effectively abandoned medicine for writing. He converted to Catholicism in 1947 and settled for the rest of his life in Covington, Louisiana.
His debut novel The Moviegoer (1961) won the National Book Award and is one of the clearest American expressions of existentialist themes in fiction. Binx Bolling, its New Orleans narrator, is a stockbroker who has settled into what Percy calls "everydayness" — the anesthetized state in which life passes unregistered — and whose quiet, Kierkegaardian search (never fully explained, even to himself) gives the novel its unmistakable shape. The later novels (The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, The Thanatos Syndrome) returned repeatedly to the same preoccupation: the pathology of a self severed from its sources of meaning, attempting to live in an everyday world whose surface conceals an abyss.
Percy's essays — collected in The Message in the Bottle (1975), Lost in the Cosmos (1983) — developed his more theoretical interests, especially a Peircean semiotic anthropology arguing that humans are constitutively the animals who signify, and that existentialist themes of alienation reflect what happens when this sign-making capacity turns on itself. He is often grouped with Flannery O'Connor as a Southern Catholic writer, though the two are temperamentally quite different — he more melancholy, more philosophically explicit, less interested than she in grace as violent intrusion.