The Moviegoer of the 1950's

Abstract

Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, has become the sort of phenomenon that Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts was in the 1930's a small success, steadily loaned, slightly sold, largely ignored in the big pictures of American fiction. In the 1930's Hemingway and Steinbeck, not West, seemed to be making the important statements about our time; in the 1960's it is Mailer and Bellow, not Percy.