This valuable and informative book is a study of Percy's five novels in the context of his southern and American literary sources and his tragic personal history. Though Percy has emphasized mainly his European existential influences, his highly allusive novels echo his tragic early years in the South, as well as his ambivalent relationship with his adoptive father William Alexander Percy and his awareness of such writers as Twain, Hemingway, and Warren.

This perceptive study examines Percy's novels in the light of psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and literary analysis. The author finds that Percy's fiction has been shaped as much by what Percy rejected as by what he embraced.