A Political Companion to Walker Percy

Contents

Contents Series Foreword vii Introduction: Walker Percy, American Political Life, and Indigenous American Thomism 1 Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith 1. Walker Percy: A Brief Biography 11 Ralph C. Wood 2. The Moviegoer’s Cartesian Theater: Moviegoing as Walker Percy’s Metaphor for the Cartesian Mind 29 Woods Nash 3. Walker Percy’s Critique of the Pursuit of Happiness in The Moviegoer, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, and The Thanatos Syndrome 47 Elizabeth Amato 4. On Dealing with Man 69 James V. Schall, S.J. 5. Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” and the Elimination of Virtue 87 Nathan P. Carson 6. Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism in Lancelot: Percy, Dostoevsky, Poe 119 Farrell O’Gorman 7. Walker Percy’s Alternative to Scientism in The Thanatos Syndrome 145 Micah Mattix 8. Love and Marriage among the Ruins 159 Richard M. Reinsch II 9. Walker Percy’s Last Men: Love in the Ruins as a Fable of American Decline 179 Brian A. Smith 10. The Second Coming of Walker Percy: From Segregationist to Integrationist 207 Brendan P. Purdy and Janice Daurio 11. Walker Percy, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Stoic and Christian Foundations of American Thomism 237 Peter Augustine Lawler Selected Bibliography 267 List of Contributors 271 Index 273 ...