In 1 volume, 3 classic early works by the Southern physician-turned-novelist who galvanized American literature with stories of spiritual searching amid modern angst
Includes the landmark, National Book Award–winning
The Moviegoer
, in a fully annotation edition
A physician-turned-writer and self-described diagnostician of “the malaise,” Percy plumbed the depths of modern American angst and alienation as few other writers have. Now he joins the Library of America series with a volume collecting his first 3 books.
(1961), winner of the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction, is the story of John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who finds in movies a resplendent reality that lifts him, for a time, out of the mire of everydayness. Binx is a modern-day pilgrim whose progress unfolds in what editor Paul Elie calls "the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours."
In
The Last Gentleman
(1966), Percy portrays another troubled, searching young man, this time a southerner living in New York whose intermitent amnesia and odd moments of déjà vu lead him to imagine that the world catastrophe everyone fears has already occurred.
A satirical work of speculative fiction,
Love in the Ruins
(1971) introduces lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Thomas More, inventor of the lapsometer, a devise that measures the spiritual sickness of a near-apocalyptic America torn apart by the forces of the far right and left.
Rounding out the volume are three short nonfiction pieces by Percy: his speech upon accepting the National Book Award, his special message to readers of the Franklin edition of
, and his address to the Publicists’ Association of the National Book Awards concerning
.