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walker percy: a life BY PATRICK H. SAMWAY | FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, 506 PAGES N.. O.. N.. F.. I.. C.. T.. I.. O.. N. . . . . . . . BY PAIGE WILLIAMS walker percy was not a boring man. He was a natural poet, a trained physician and a writer with a privileged but tragic past whose novels and essays reflected an enduring and often quixotic search for himself, his god, life's truths. He came from the South -- from Alabama and Mississippi, the most Southern states of all -- yet wrote with a universal eye and a cultured perspective. We learn why in Patrick H. Samway's biography, "Walker Percy: A Life." This voluminous work examines Percy's complex life in 14 sections, from "The Birmingham Years" (1916-29) to "The Thanatos Syndrome" and "Final Illness" (1986-90). Samway, who edited two collections of Percy's essays and letters while writing this book, knows his subject intimately, having spent many hours with Percy after initiating a friendship in 1978. "Both the man and the author intrigue me," Samway writes, "and I find in my own life that he is still teaching me." His finely researched account begins within the Percy familial web and the industrial city of Birmingham, Ala., where Walker Percy was born into an aristocratic chain of Confederate cabinet members, Ivy Leaguers, U.S. senators and world travelers. Percy's South was one of planter privilege, with chauffeurs, marble sculptures and furniture covered in silk, a place where Percy matured to the sound of Shakespeare, Brahms and Keats. "Walker would listen intently and catch the spirit and beauty of what he heard and root it in his memory," Samway writes. This biography gives particular weight to the extraordinary influences of Percy's childhood, notably his father's suicide and his mother's pivotal decision to move her family to an uncle's home in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenville, Miss. Here, Percy grew up under the tutelage and generosity of his bachelor uncle, a notable artist in his own right. Here, as a youth, Percy began publishing his writing. Here, he met Shelby Foote, a classmate who became his lifelong friend. And here, most significantly, he lost his mother to what he always quietly considered suicide. The early years fed the later years. Percy was writing even when he wasn't. He was soaking up and sorting out the nuances and locales, the themes of religion and identity that would dominate classics such as "The Last Gentleman" and "The Moviegoer" and establish Percy as a writer with the unique double perspective of scientist and artist. This is an exceedingly well-reported biography. Its only weakness may be a tendency toward orphaned detail, as though the author used everything in his notebook and neglected to put some of it in context. In heavily footnoted stretches, it seems as though Samway was tediously determined to catalog facts instead of producing a seamless piece of insightful narrative. Yet Samway is, if anything, thorough, and with "Walker Percy: A Life," he offers a definitive account of a man worth every drop of ink. May 2, 1997 Paige Williams, a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html