The Second Coming

Walker Percy was an American author who lived from 1916 to 1990. Percy was born and resided in the southern United States for the majority of his life. His father’s ancestors were members of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, although Percy supported the Civil Rights movement. When Percy was 13 years old, his father, LeRoy Pratt Percy, died by suicide. His mother, Martha Susan Phinizy, died after driving her car off of a bridge two years later, which Percy regarded as another suicide. Percy and his siblings, once orphaned, were sent to live with their first cousin once removed, William Alexander Percy, in Greenville, Mississippi. This family history of suicide is heavily reflected in Percy’s works, particularly The Second Coming. Many details of Will Barrett’s life, such as the death of his father and mother at a young age and his upbringing in Mississippi, are directly drawn from Percy’s own upbringing.

Percy attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then moved to New York City in 1941 to become a doctor of psychiatry. However, his medical career was cut short when he contracted tuberculosis. Due to this illness, Percy was unable to work or to fight in World War II. Instead, he recovered while reading books by existentialist philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard. Percy published his first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961. His novels reflect his interest in existentialist philosophy and in the field of semiotics—the study of how meaning is constructed through signs such as words and images. Percy was also heavily influenced by his conversion to Catholicism. While he was raised in a Protestant family, Percy joined the Roman Catholic Church shortly after his marriage in 1947. His novels such as Love in the Ruins (1971) and The Second Coming (1980) explore characters experiencing a crisis of faith in God and reference theological debates within the Catholic tradition.