More on: Walker Percy

Our solitude turns out to be crowded. The writer’s tiny hut is filled with ghosts; the painter’s chilly studio is populated by unseen rivals; in the poet’s hard-won hideaway, invisible influences lurk. Others are always already there. So much for the romantic myth.

IN HIS his masterful book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (reviewed in this issue), Paul Elie has crafted a braided narrative about the lives and works of four twentieth-century American Catholic writers, all of whom have become canonical figures: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. The first sentence of…

  Tim Gautreaux was born in Morgan City, Louisiana, in 1947. He attended Nicholls State University and the University of South Carolina, where he earned a PhD in English literature. In 1972 he began teaching creative writing at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he directed the creative writing program until his retirement in 2003. His books…