Eudora Welty and Walker Percy were friends but very different writers, even though both were from the Deep South and intensely interested in the relation of place to their fiction. This work explores in each the concept of home and the importance of home to the homo viator (“man on his way”), and anti-idealism and anti-romanticism.
The differences between Welty and Percy and in their fiction were revealed in the habits of their lives. Welty spent her life in Jackson, Mississippi, and was very much a member of the community. Percy was a wanderer who finally settled in Covington, Louisiana, because it was, as he called it, a “noplace.” The author also asserts that Percy somewhat envied Welty and her stability in Jackson, and that for him, place was such a nagging concern that it became a personal problem to him as homo viator.

The late Marion Montgomery was professor emeritus of English at the University of Georgia. In 2003, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute honored Montgomery with the Gerhart Niemeyer Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship in Liberal Arts. He lived in Crawford, Georgia.

Marion Montgomery
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 220
Bibliographic Info: notes, index
Copyright Date: 2004
pISBN: 978-0-7864-1663-9
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction      1

Part I
The Swift Bird of Memory, the Breadboard of Art: Reflections on Eudora Welty and Her Storytelling      17

Part II
Walker Percy’s Quest for the Word Within the Word: A Preliminary      91

Notes      199
Index      211

“recommended”—Choice; “engaging…readers…will be rewarded in reading [Montgomery]…provides a pathway out of modernity’s dark wood”—Modern Age; “explores the friendship between these authors, the different ways they represented home in their fiction, and how they understood the home viator, or ‘man on his way’”—American Literature; “a riveting account”—St. Austin Review; “I regard Marion Montgomery as one of the most acute and profound criticis of present-day American culture. He brings to his discussion of it penetrating insight and solid scholarship.”—Cleanth Brooks. “Provides a pathway out of modernity’s dark wood”—Patrick J. Walsh.