Walker Percy

Percy trained as a doctor and wrote his way out of it. He caught tuberculosis while interning at Bellevue, and in a sanatorium he read the European existentialists and concluded that science could not answer why anyone lives. He married Bunt Townsend in 1946, the couple became Catholics, and he built a house in Covington to write. His first novel came in 1961. Nearly two decades later he helped bring A Confederacy of Dunces into print, in 1980, at the urging of John Kennedy Toole's mother. He died in Covington in 1990.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fontainebleau State Park — 10 mi
  Lakeshore park on the Northshore where Tchefuncte potters, Acolapissa and Choctaw lived, and where 153 people were enslaved at Marigny's sugar and brick plantation by 1840; the mill ruin still stands.

More markers nearby

• Covington — 0.3 mi
• West Florida Republic and St. Tammany Parish — 5.1 mi
• Civil War Earthworks — 6.2 mi
• Lake Pontchartrain Causeway — 7.7 mi