Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In a short, seemingly one-off essay, "Why I Live Where I Live," Walker Percy writes that particular cities can either aid or restrict a writer's ability to make sense of one's existence in the tumultuous twentieth century. For Percy, the ghosts of the past can inundate a place. He advised writers, especially Southern ones, to "avoid the horrors of total placement." In citing Charleston, South Carolina, and Mobile, Alabama, as places where a Southern writer's family has lived for 200 years, Percy remarks that such cities are prone to be haunted places where "ancestors perch on your shoulder" (3).
Repository Citation
Margrave, Chris. "Covington is the Non-Place for Me: Walker Percy’s Topophilia in the Deserts of Theory and Consumption." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1–14. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss4/11