Maso, Jean S. (Author)
Journal of American Culture
Volume: 33
Pages: 107--120
Publication date: 2010
Language: English
Dr. Walker Percy (1916--90), physician and writer from the American south, is best known for his philosophically grounded writings, both nonfiction and fiction. Among many honors, Percy won the National Book Award for his first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1962. Less known is how Percy's experience as a 1940s tuberculosis patient in the American north defined his creative mind-set and how Percy himself documented that turning point in an earlier unpublished novel, The Gramercy Winner. When considered in the pathographic tradition, Percy's early attempt at story telling typifies the way patients reconstruct illness through a blending of nonfictional and fictional narrative. Set in northern New York in the same small Adirondack mountain community where he was treated for TB, his narrative reveals what Maria Montello calls Percy's transition, a journey or pilgrimage from one kind of diagnostic and therapeutic activity to another (qtd. in Elliott 48). In The Gramercy Winner Percy both explores his individual transformation from physician to writer and exposes the culture of an illness that transformed the collective American mindset before the advent of wonder drugs in the early 1950s that promised a chemotherapeutic cure. As David Morris observes in Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, tuberculosis was, in short, a lifestyle, a parable, a theater of illness complete with tacit rules, recurrent images, and complex social meanings that came to dominate the imagination of an entire century (Morris 55--56).
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