Winner of the 1962 National Book Award and one of Time magazine’s 100 Best English-Language Novels, Walker Percy’s debut The Moviegoer is an American masterpiece and a classic of Southern literature. Insightful, romantic, and humorous, it is the story of a young man’s search for meaning amid a shallow consumerist landscape.
Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker, fills his days with movies and casual sex. His life offers him nothing worth retaining; what he treasures are scenes from The Third Man or Stagecoach, not the personal experiences he knows other people hold dear. On the cusp of turning thirty, however, something changes: At Mardi Gras, he embarks on a quest for some form of authentic experience. The consequences of Binx’s quest, on both himself and his unstable cousin Kate, prove outrageous, absurd, moving, and indelible.
Featuring a new afterword by Paul Elie, this new edition of The Moviegoer cements Walker Percy’s place as a giant of American literature.
Walker Percy was the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestsellers The Moviegoer and The Thanatos Syndrome. He was awarded numerous prizes in his lifetime, including the National Book Award, and is considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He lived in Covington, Louisiana, until his death in 1990.