Abstract

Walker Percy was an American Catholic and Southern writer best known for novels about the place and purpose of the individual in the universe, but two of his novels were more explicitly political in nature. Percy’s reflections on the state of the American regime informed several essays as well as his politically-oriented novels. He was concerned about the condition to which the United States had declined in the late twentieth century, and examined how the nation’s pursuit of the wrong kind of happiness contributed to its decline and endangered its future. Percy understood that true happiness lay in virtue and in faith, and he laid considerable blame for America’s cultural decline on its embrace of scientific materialism. While his novels are not didactic, they urge a return to faith as the key to saving American society.