
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 11, 1990                   TAG: 9005110148
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: COVINGTON, LA.                                LENGTH: Short

WALKER PERCY, WRITER, DIES AT 74

Walker Percy, whose deeply humane novels and essays made him a unique voice in American letters, died of cancer Thursday at his home.

He would have been 75 on Monday.

Percy's first novel, "The Moviegoer," won him the National Book Award in 1962 and set the themes that would occupy him for his entire career: modern malaise in the New South and the tenuous, often outlandishly comic, hope for human connection.

After "Moviegoer," Percy's novels included "The Last Gentleman" (1966), "Love in the Ruins" (1971), "Lancelot" (1977), "The Second Coming" (1980), and "The Thanatos Syndrome" (1987).

He peddled his 1983 "Lost in the Cosmos" as "the last self-help book" and set out to "explain why it is that man is the only alien creature, as far as we know, in the entire planet."

His other major piece of non-fiction was "The Message in the Bottle" (1975), essays on the philosophy of language.

by CNB