Question: What do Southern transcenders and Chinese Marxists have in common?

Answer:

“Southern transcenders are the worst of all—for they hate the old bloody immanence of the South. Southerners outdo their teachers, just as the Chinese Marxists outdo the Soviets. Did you ever talk to a female Freudian Georgia social worker? Freud would be horrified.”

-From Sutter Vaught's casebook, in Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman

So I was sitting in UNC's undergraduate library, reading down the home stretch of The Last Gentleman, when I started to wonder if this library has any collections of essays on or reviews of Walker Percy. In the process of the computer search, it comes to my attention that UNC's Rare Book Collection has Mr. Percy's entire personal library. I would have thought that his books would have ended up in Alabama or someplace—although he did go to school here.

I don't know if I'll be able to use anything from this collection, but to feel a sudden physical connection to the (dead) author of a good book—his own well-used books, here in this building!—is something special.

(By the way, Percy and the great North Carolina novelist Thomas Wolfe both worked along the Chapel Hill-New York City axis. Do other Southern schools have similar artists, similar paths?)