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Walker Percy's Non-fiction Books - Tables of Contents

A Complete Listing of the Tables of Contents for Walker Percy's Non-fiction and Related Books

Directory

Select a book title from the following list to review the table of contents of each of Walker Percy's non-fiction books found below on this page. Links to the book descriptions for each book are included. These listings supplement the Project's Walker Percy semiotics section and may be printed for reference purposes..

Non-fiction Books, Essay Collections, and Correspondence

  1. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (Essay collection, 1975)
  2. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (Non-fiction book, 1983)
  3. Signposts in a Strange Land (Essay collection, 1991)
  4. A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy (Correspondence collection, 1995)
  5. Symbol and Existence: A Study in Meaning: Explorations of Human Nature (Non-fiction book, 2019)

Interview Collections

  1. Conversations with Walker Percy (1985)
  2. More Conversations with Walker Percy (1993)

Related Book

  1. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy (Correspondence collection, 1996)

Non-fiction Books, Essay Collections, and Correspondence

(Chronological)

1. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

By Walker Percy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975) (Essay collection)
Book Description

Contents

  1. The Delta Factor
  2. Loss of the Creature
  3. Metaphor as Mistake
  4. The Man on the Train
  5. Notes for a Novel about the End of the World
  6. The Message in the Bottle
  7. The Mystery of Language
  8. Toward a Triadic Theory of Meaning
  9. The Symbolic Structure of Interpersonal Process
  10. Culture: The Antinomy of the Scientific Method
  11. Semiotic and a Theory of Knowledge
  12. Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity
  13. Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism
  14. Symbol as Need
  15. A Theory of Language

Directory


2. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

By Walker Percy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983) (Non-fiction book)
Book Description

Front Matter

LOST IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK

or

The Strange Case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos

or

How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians

or

Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest

or

Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life

or

How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California-- or the Cosmos

plus

A Twenty-Question Quiz which will not help you become rich or more assertive or more creative or make love better but which may--though it probably won't, considering how useless most self- help books are--help you discover who you are not and even--an outside chance--who you are

plus

A preliminary short quiz which you can take standing in a bookstore and which will allow you to determine whether you need to buy this book and proceed to the Twenty Questions

plus

A short history of the Cosmos, including a semiotic theory of the Self which explains why it is that man is the only alien creature, as far as we know, in the entire Cosmos

plus

A space odyssey which gives an account of what can happen to an earthling astronaut if there is somebody out there and what can happen if there is no one out there

* * *

Contents

A Preliminary Short Quiz
so that you may determine whether you need to take the Twenty-Question Self-Help Quiz [below]. If you can answer these questions, you are not lost in the Cosmos

Twenty-Question Multiple-Choice Self-Help Quiz
to test your knowledge of the peculiar status of the self, your self and other selves, in the Cosmos, and your knowledge of what to do with your self in these, the last years of the twentieth century

  1. The Amnesic Self: Why the Self Wants to Get Rid of Itself
  2. The Self as Nought: How the Self Tries to Inform Itself by Possessing Things which do not Look like the Things They're Used as
  3. The Self as Nought (II): Why Most Women, and Some Men, are Subject to Fashion
  4. The Nowhere Self: How the Self, which Usually Experiences Itself as Living Nowhere, is Surprised to Find that it Lives Somewhere
  5. The Fearful Self: Why the Self is so Afraid of Being Found Out
  6. The Fearful Self (II): Why the Self is so Afraid of being Stuck with another Self
  7. The Fearful Self (III): How the Self Tries to Escape its Predicament
  8. The Misplaced Self: How Two Selves Confronting Each Other can Miscalculate, Each Attributing a Putative and Spurious Reality to the Other and Trying to Match it, with the Consequence that Both Swelves Become Non-selves
  9. The Promiscuous Self: Why is it that One's Self not only does not Prefer Sex with one's Chosen Mate, Chosen for His or Her Attractiveness and Suitability, even when the Mate is a Person well known to one, knowing of one, loved by one, with a Life, Time, and Family in common, but rather prefers Sex with a New Person, even a Total Stranger, or even Vicariously through Pornography
  10. The Envious Self (in the root sense of envy: invidere, to look at with malice): Why it is that the Self--though it Professes to be Loving, Caring, to Prefer Peace to War, Concord to Discord, Life to Death; to Wish Other Selves Well, not Ill--in fact Secretly Relishes Wars and Rumors of War, News of Plane Crashes, Assassinations, Mass Murders, Obituaries, to say nothing of Local News about Acquaintances Dropping Dead in the Street, Gossip about Neighbors Getting in Fights or being Detected in Sexual Scandals, Embezzlements, and other Disgraces
  11. The Bored Self: Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored
  12. The Depressed Self: Whether the Self is Depressed because there is Something Wrong with it or whether Depression is a Normal Response to a Deranged World
  13. The Impoverished Self: How the Self can be Poor though Rich

Intermezzo

The following section, an intermezzo of some forty pages, can be skipped without fatal consequences. It is not technical but it is theoretical; i.e., it attempts an elementary semiotical grounding of the theory of the self taken for granted in these pages. As such, it will be unsatisfactory to many readers. It will irritate many lay readers by appearing to be too technical; what does he care about semiotics? It will irritate many professional semioticists by not being technical enough and for focusing on one dimension of semiotics which semioticists, for whatever reason, are not accustomed to regard as a proper subject of inquiry., i.e., not texts and other coded sign utterances but the self which produces texts or hears sign utterances.

A Semiotic Primer of the Self: A Short History of the Cosmos with Emphasis on the Nature and Origin of the Self, plus a Semiotic Model for Computing Impoverishment in the Midst of Plenty, or Why it is Possible to Feel Bad in a Good Environment and Good in a Bad Environment
  1. How the Self Characteristically Places itself vis-a-vis the World, particularly through modes of Transcendence and Immanence
  2. The Orbiting Self: Reentry Problems of the Transcending Self, or Why it is that Artists and Writers, some Technologists, and indeed Most People have so much Trouble Living in the Ordinary World
  3. The Exempted Self: How Scientists Don't Have to Take Account of Themselves and Other Selves in their Science and Some Difficulties that Arise when they have to
  4. The Lonely Self: Why the Autonomous Self feels so Alone in the Cosmos that it will go to any Length to talk to Chimpanzees, Dolphins, and Humpback Whales
  5. The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is so Anxious to Establish Communication with an ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
  6. The Demoniac Self: Why it is the Autonomous Self becomes Possessed by the Spirit of the Erotic and the Secret Love of Violence, and how Unlucky it is that this should have Happened in the Nuclear Age
  7. The Self Marooned in the Cosmos: What would you say if you met a man Friday out there? What do you think he would say to you? Could you understand him?
  8. The Self Marooned in the Cosmos: What do you do if there is no man Friday out there and we are really alone?

Directory


3. Signposts in a Strange Land

Patrick H. Samway, S.J., Editor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991) (Essay collection) [posthumous]
Book Description

Note: various essays in this collection treat Percy's semiotics directly, notably in Section II: Science, Language, Literature.

Contents

I. Life in the South
  • Why I Live Where I Live
  • New Orleans Mon Amour
  • The City of the Dead
  • Going Back to Georgia
  • Mississippi: The Fallen Paradise
  • Uncle Will, originally entitled "Introduction" to Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son, by William Alexander Percy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), pp. vii-xviii.
  • Uncle Will's House
  • A Better Louisiana, originally entitled "Charting Our Future: Improving Education is the Key to a Better Louisiana," The Times-Picayune/The States-Item (New Orleans), May 23, 1985: A-25.
  • The American War
  • Red, White, and Blue-Gray
  • Stoicism in the South
  • A Southern View
  • The Southern Moderate
  • Bourbon
II. Science, Language, Literature
  • Is a Theory of Man Possible?
  • Naming and Being
  • The State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science?
  • Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time
  • How to be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic
  • From Facts to Fiction
  • Physician as Novelist
  • Herman Melville
  • Diagnosing the Modern Malaise
  • Eudora Welty in Jackson
  • Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pp. v-vii.
  • Redicovering A Canticle for Leibowitz
  • The Movie Magazine: A Low "Slick"
  • Accepting the National Book Award for The Moviegoer
  • Concerning Love in the Ruins, talk at the 1971 National Book Award Spring Press Conference
  • The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry
  • The Culture Critics
  • The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind
III. Morality and Religion
  • Culture, the Church, and Evangelization
  • Why Are You a Catholic?
  • A "Cranky Novelist" Reflects on the Church
  • The Failure and the Hope
  • A View of Abortion, with Something to Offend Everybody
  • Foreword to The New Catholics, edited by Dan O'Neill (New York: Crossroad, 1987), pp.xiii-xv.
  • If I Had Five Minutes with the Pope
  • An Unpublished Letter to the Times
  • Another Message in the Bottle ["From a Writer to Shipwrecked Teachers, or Why Should Students Read Novels Instead of Watching the Tube?" Unpublished].
  • The Holiness of the Ordinary
Epilogue
  • Interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy
  • Questions They Never Asked Me [A Self-Interview]

Directory


4. A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy

Patrick H. Samway, S.J., Editor (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995) (Correspondence) [posthumous]
Book Description

Contents

  1. Introduction / ix
  2. Letters / 3
  3. Appendix I / 169
  4. Appendix II / 195
  5. Notes / 311
  6. Bibliography / 315
  7. Index / 319

Directory


5. Symbol and Existence: A Study in Meaning: Explorations of Human Nature

By Walker Percy (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2019)
Co-editors: Kenneth Laine Ketner, Karey Lea Perkins, Rhonda Reneé McDonnell, Scott Ross Cunningham (Non-fiction book) [posthumous]
Book Description

Contents

Directory


Interview Collections

(Chronological)

Note: various interviews in each of the following interview collections discuss Percy's semiotics.

6. Conversations with Walker Percy

Victor A. Kramer and Lewis Lawson, Editors (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985)
Book Description

Contents

Directory


7. More Conversations with Walker Percy

Victor A. Kramer and Lewis Lawson, Editors (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993) [posthumous]
Book Description

Contents

Directory


Related Book

8. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Jay Tolson, Editor (New York: Norton/DoubleTake, 1996) (Correspondence) [posthumous]
Book Description

Note: This correspondence collection between Shelby Foote and Walker Percy contains several limited references by Percy to his ongoing work in semiotics.

Contents

Directory