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 an afterword by Paul Elie, this new edition of The Moviegoer cements Walker Percy's place as a giant of American literature.

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.

The Moviegoer (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 The Moviegoer, and his address to the Publicists' Association of the National Book Awards concerning Love in the Ruins.

Walker Percy's mordantly funny and wholly original contribution to the self-help book craze deals with the Western mind's tendency toward heavy abstraction. This favorite of Percy fans continues to charm and beguile readers of all tastes and backgrounds. Lost in the Cosmos invites us to think about how we communicate with our world.

Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.

Lancelot Lamar is a disenchanted lawyer who finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don't seem worth remembering. It all began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter, a discovery which sent Lancelot on modern quest to reverse the degeneration of America. Percy's novel reveals a shining knight for the modern age--a knight not of romance, but of revenge.

Will Barrett is a 25-year-old wanderer from the South living in New York City, detached from his roots and with no plans for the future, until the purchase of a telescope sets off a romance and changes his life forever.

Returning home to the small Louisiana parish where he had praticed psychiatry, Dr. Tom More quickly notices something strange occuring with the townfolk, a loss of inhibitions. Behind this mystery is a dangerous plot drug the local water supply, and a discovery that takes More into the underside of the American search for happiness.

In Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy offers insights on such varied yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, Helen Keller, Semioticism, and the incredible Delta Factor. Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us.

Will Barrett (also the hero of Percy's The Last Gentleman) is a lonely widower suffering from a depression so severe that he decides he doesn't want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself in a greenhouse. The Second Coming is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will sets out in search of God's existence and winds up finding much more.

At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.