Walker Percy

Orphaned young (his father died by suicide, his mother in a car accident soon after), Percy was raised by a cousin in Mississippi and trained as a physician at Columbia, contracting tuberculosis during his own pathology residency, which ended his medical career and gave him years of enforced reading.

That convalescence turned him toward Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus, and toward Catholicism, which he converted to in his thirties. The Moviegoer, his first novel, beat far more heavily favored books to win the 1962 National Book Award, launching a career spent diagnosing suburban American anomie through a doctor's clinical eye.

He lived the rest of his life in Covington, Louisiana, writing essays on language and semiotics alongside his novels, and died there of prostate cancer in 1990.