The author is particularly well qualified to evaluate novelist Walker Percy"s philosophical interests and 1947 conversion to Catholicism: Patrick Samway, a Jesuit priest, edited a volume of Percy"s uncollected essays and another of his correspondence on the subject of American semiotician Charles Sanders Pierce. Although he knew Percy (1916-90) personally in his final years, Samway maintains a scholarly distance in this meticulously researched biography. It does not supplant Jay Tolson"s more passionate 1992 assessment, but offers a valuable additional perspective.