After contracting tuberculosis while interning at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Alabama native Walker Percy abandoned the medical profession to become—in words he would use to describe doctor-turned-writer Anton Chekhov—“the pathologist of the strange spiritual malady of the modern age.” Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, published in 1961 on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday, won the National Book Award and launched him on a remarkable second career. Here for the first time in one volume are the three books that announced a major new voice in American fiction.

The Moviegoer tells the story of John Bickerson “Binx” Bolling, a wryly sensitive New Orleans stockbroker on the cusp of thirty who is “sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” Dalliances with his secretaries and frequent trips to the cinema offer at best temporary transport from the quiet despair that dogs him. During the week of Mardi Gras, Binx hatches a desperate and reckless plan to escape with his troubled cousin, Kate, in search of a transcendent, more authentic mode of living, and finds instead an unexpected sort of redemption.

The Last Gentleman (1966) features another spiritual seeker, a Princeton-educated southerner working in New York City as a night janitor. Beguiled and bemused by the possibilities of modern life, Will Barrett spends his days idling in Central Park until he attaches himself to the Vaught family, fellow southerners in Manhattan seeking treatment for their dying son. What follows is a twisting cross-country odyssey that Joyce Carol Oates has called “a highly whimsical kind of picaresque tale that puts one in mind of both Faulkner and Camus.”

Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (1971) is a wickedly funny work of speculative fiction set in an apocalyptic near future. The United States has splintered into rival political cultures—left and right, Black and white, young and old—that seem to exist in separate realities. At the center of this national crisis is Dr. Tom More, a descendent of Sir Thomas More and inventor of the “Ontological Lapsometer,” a device with the potential to save—or destroy—humankind.

Rounding out the volume are three short pieces by Percy, including his National Book Award acceptance speech for The Moviegoer, in which he reflects on his artistic aims, as well as a newly researched chronology of Percy’s life and career.

Paul Elie, editor, is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. His first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a study of the Catholic writers Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle award finalist in 2003. He is also the author of Reinventing Bach, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in 2012. He lives in New York City.