Walker Percy
Covington, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana
Marker Inscription
Walker Percy (1916 - 1990). Covington resident, where he wrote, among others, Lancelot, The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins, The Thanatos Syndrome, The Last Gentleman, and The Moviegoer, which won the National Book Award for fiction. Co-founder Fellowship of Southern Writers, graduate of the University of North Carolina, buried at St. Joseph Abbey, 3 miles north.
The Story
Novelist Walker Percy (1916–1990) made his home in Covington, where he wrote much of his acclaimed fiction, including Lancelot, The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins, The Thanatos Syndrome, The Last Gentleman, and The Moviegoer, winner of the National Book Award. A co-founder of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a University of North Carolina graduate, he explored faith, alienation, and the modern South. He is buried at nearby St. Joseph Abbey.
Why it matters
Percy stands among the major voices of postwar Southern literature, and this quiet Louisiana town shaped the settings and sensibility of his work.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Walker Percy came of age as a writer in the decades after World War II, a time when American fiction was turning inward — away from grand social panoramas and toward the private ache of individuals trying to feel at home in a prosperous, restless country. The South of these years was changing fast, its old certainties loosening, and its writers were among the most searching in the nation.
Covington sits on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, across the water from New Orleans, in the piney, spring-fed country of St. Tammany Parish. It was — and still is — a quieter place than the city, a town of shaded streets and slow afternoons. That quiet was not incidental to Percy's work; it was the room in which he did his thinking.
He belonged to a generation of Southern writers who wrestled openly with faith, memory, and the question of how to live well in a modern world that seemed to have misplaced its sense of purpose. Covington gave him the distance to watch that world clearly.
People & events
Walker Percy (1916–1990) made his home here and did much of his writing in this town. It was in Covington that he produced the novels that built his reputation — among them The Moviegoer, which won the National Book Award for fiction, along with Lancelot, The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins, The Thanatos Syndrome, and The Last Gentleman.
His fiction returned again and again to people adrift in ordinary comfort, searching for meaning they can't quite name. He was trained to look at the world with a diagnostic eye, and his novels carry that quality — patient, probing, unwilling to accept easy answers about why modern people feel so out of place.
Percy also helped found the Fellowship of Southern Writers, an organization meant to encourage and honor the literature of his region, and he was a graduate of the University of North Carolina. After his death he was buried at St. Joseph Abbey, a Benedictine monastery about three miles north of town — a resting place that fits a writer so preoccupied with belief and the life of the spirit.
Its place in the American story
Percy stands among the major voices of postwar American letters, and especially of the Southern literary tradition that gave the country some of its most enduring twentieth-century fiction. His work helped define a mood — the sense of a comfortable society quietly unsure of what it was for — that spoke well beyond the South.
His National Book Award marked him as more than a regional figure. Readers across the country recognized in his novels their own restlessness, their own hunger for something steadier than success. That a writer working in a small Louisiana town could reach that national audience is part of what makes this place worth remembering.
Markers like this one remind us that great American literature was not written only in famous cities. It was often written in ordinary towns, by people who chose the quiet on purpose.
If you visit
Covington rewards an unhurried visit. Wander its downtown streets and you'll get a feel for the kind of place a thoughtful writer might choose — close enough to New Orleans to know the wider world, far enough to hear yourself think.
If you're the sort of traveler who likes to close the loop on a story, you can look toward St. Joseph Abbey to the north, where Percy is buried. The monastery grounds have the stillness that runs all through his work.
Bring one of his novels along, or pick one up before you come. Reading a few pages here — in the town where the sentences were written — turns a roadside stop into something closer to a conversation with the man himself.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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