The Moviegoer
10 best books like The Moviegoer (Walker Percy): Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Adventures of Augie March, All the King's Men, The Heart of the Matter, Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, The Day of the Locust, The Power and the Glory, Appointment in Samarra, A Death in the Family
| Author | Willa Cather |
| ISBN | 0679728899 |
There is something epic—and almost mythic—about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast...
| Author | Saul Bellow |
| ISBN | 0143039571 |
Augie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” It’s the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American...
| Author | Robert Penn Warren |
| ISBN | 0156004801 |
More than just a classic political novel, Warren’s tale of power and corruption in the Depression-era South is a sustained meditation on the unforeseen consequences of every human act, the vexing connectedness of all people and the possibility—it’s not much of one—of goodness in a sinful...
| Author | Graham Greene |
| ISBN | 0099478420 |
In a British colony in West Africa, Henry Scobie is a pious and righteous man of modest means enlisted with securing borders. But when he’s passed over for a promotion as commissioner of police, the humiliation hits hardest for his wife, Louise. Already oppressed by the appalling climate, frustrated...
| Author | Flannery O'Connor |
| ISBN | 0374530637 |
Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is a story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher...
| Author | Flannery O'Connor |
| ISBN | 0374505241 |
First published in 1960, The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousins, the schoolteacher...
| Author | Nathanael West |
| ISBN | 0451523482 |
The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by...
| Author | Graham Greene |
| ISBN | 0142437301 |
In a poor, remote section of Southern Mexico, the paramilitary group, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest is on the run. Too human for heroism, too humble for martyrdom, the nameless little worldly...
| Author | John O'Hara |
| ISBN | 0375719202 |
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian...
| Author | James Agee |
| ISBN | 0375701230 |
The classic American novel, re-published for the 100th anniversary of James Agee's birth
Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative...
| Author | Padgett Powell |
| ISBN | 0805013709 |
Simons Everson Manigault ('You say it 'Simmons.' I'm a rare one-m Simons") lives with his mother, an eccentric professor (known as the Duchess), on an isolated and undeveloped strip of South Carolina coast. Convinced that her son can be a writer of genius, the Duchess has immersed Simons in the literary...
| Author | Bernard Malamud |
| ISBN | 0374504849 |
Bernard Malamud’s second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who “wants better” for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his...
| Author | Nicholson Baker |
| ISBN | 1862070997 |
The fact is a large cadre of klutzes (call them Baker-deniers) consider our man Nicholson to be a lightweight author. An inward bourgeois bore picking fluff from his well-gazed navel. Stephen King is to blame thanks to his ungenerous quote about thumbnail pickings (this coming from a man that publishes...
The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
| Author | Shelby Foote |
| ISBN | 0393317684 |
In the late 1940s, Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, friends since their teenage years in Greenville, Mississippi, began a correspondence that would last until Percy's death in 1990. Walker Percy, the highly regarded author of The Moviegoer, wrote six novels, two volumes of philosophical writings,...
| Author | Budd Schulberg |
| ISBN | 1566631076 |
Budd Schulberg's celebrated novel of the prize ring has lost none of its power since its first publication almost fifty years ago. Crowded with unforgettable characters, it is a relentless expose of the fight racket. A modern Samson in the form of a simple Argentine peasant is ballyhooed by an unscrupulous...
