In 1950, a Birmingham-born doctor named Walker Percy moved to Covington, Louisiana, and never left. He had contracted tuberculosis treating patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York, spent two years recovering in a sanitarium, converted to Catholicism, and decided he was done with cities. Covington gave him what he needed: distance from literary New York, proximity to the New Orleans he found endlessly strange, and enough quiet to write. His first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award in 1962 and remains one of the finest American novels about alienation ever written — set largely in Gentilly, New Orleans, but shaped by the remove of the North Shore. Percy lived and wrote in Covington for four decades, producing six novels and several works of nonfiction that placed him alongside Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner in the Southern literary canon. He walked the same streets, drank coffee in the same shops, and was buried at St. Joseph Abbey in 1990. Covington does not perform its Percy connection loudly — there is no theme park, no walking tour with audio guide. The town simply exists as the place he chose, which is the most Percy thing about it.
