Marion Montgomery, a distinguished emeritus professor of English at UGA, makes in this new book a retrospective “journey” with noted Southern author Walker Percy (1916-1990), and in it, Percy comes to an accommodation with the modern world in the company of other companionable journeymen.
Percy’s journey from and back to the South, and his acceptance of what his uncle, famed Southern author, William Alexander Percy, exhibited as “Southern stoicism,” reoriented Percy in a personal way, occurring in a world far removed from the South.
As a medical intern in the North, Percy contracted tuberculosis—a devastating outcome that Percy “would later conclude more an act of grace than an accidental misfortune as science might have it.”
Recovering, he began to read important authors and left the field of medicine to “doctor to man in a different way.”
When Percy, recuperating from TB, understood the “holiness of the ordinary,” he also discovered that this world “is a sacrament,” and that he must use his gifts to develop an attitude toward existence that is itself a celebration of that sacredness.
The book notes that Percy finally recognized himself as being in a predicament that required of him “a searching and a finding.”