This book reveals the life of R. Clay Crawford, his dreams, his schemes, his successes and his failures, as he launched himself into many of the most turbulent episodes of nineteenth-century United States history. Like everyone else, he was born with a family history, not just genetic, but also cultural, determinants; this book therefore reveals the influences on his behavior inherited from his father and his grandfathers. And, again like everyone else, he passed on to his children a model, not just genetic, but cultural. Even so, Clay's story is not just a family affair. Clay was a ""self-made man,"" living in an age when that figure was thought to be a national asset-he thus stands out as a warning that the worship of the ""self-made man"" produces more rogues than Rockefellers.

When critics first began to respond to the fiction of Walker Percy, they frequently refarded it as a fiction of ideas. The most significant themes were Percy's religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs. Such conceptions of the man were grounded in his own essays, a genre which in his hands tended toward the impersonal and the abstract. In time Percy critics like William Rodney Allen began to prove into Percy's biography for resources that verified their intense critical speculations about the background of Percy's fiction. In his childhood was his father's suicide and its significant emergence in his fiction. Percy's biographers have continued this investigation of the father's influence. Jay Tolson deftly represent the theme of the paternal death as a vacuum Percy felt throughout his life, while Bertram Wyatt-Brown studied the Percy family ethos, which he showed to be shadowed for two hundred years by high expectations, depression, and self-destruction. Now, in Still Following Percy, a collection of interrelated essays, Lewis Lawson studies the Percy canon to speculate that an earlier and more fundamental shaping of Walker Percy's character and fictional imagination was his sense of the in adequacy of the relationship with he as an infant had with his mother and of her early death. Lawson argues that the sense of loss led to Percy's tendency to regression, to his need to create his own life narrative in fiction after psychoanalysis had been insufficient as a means of reconstruction, and to his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Lawson interprets Percy's conversion as a statement of the possibility of reconciliation through the transcendent truth.

This collection of interviews supplements "Conversations with Walker Percy" and occasions an additional two dozen pleasurable encounters with Percy. Primarily from the last ten years of Percys life, they show how his presence was stimulating thought in much of humanistic America, in literature, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and in cultural life in general.

Although this acclaimed author of "The Moviegoer, Lancelot, " and "Love in the Ruins" never overcame his shyness with interviewers, he continued to grant interviews as long as his health permitted. This act of openness illustrates his humility before his ideas and his desire to help others understand them.

The interviews in this collection show him at a height when he knew that his illness would not allow him to write any more books, and that the only way to restate his ideas and offer a valediction to the large audience to whom he had always been kind, patient, and appreciative was to speak out. Percy d

These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close-up encounters with one of America's most celebrated writers.

These twenty-seven interviews cover a period of twenty-two years, from the time of the publication of Percy's first novel, "The Moviegoer," in 1961, until 1983, when he was interviewed about his friendship with Thomas Merton.

This volume is the second in the "Literary Conversations" series. These unabridged interviews, collected from a variety of sources, will give reading pleasure to general readers who wish to know Percy and his works more closely, and they will be of great use to Percy scholars.