“With Quinlan’s informed, sympathetic, but rigorously analytical study, Walker Percy, a Catholic convert with a compulsion to defend his faith both in essays and in fiction, finally gets a superb scholarly exposition of not only the neoconservative theological orthodoxy of this work but also the rapidly changing religious, intellectual, and cultural context in which he wrote.”—Choice

“Combining close textual readings and biographical insight, Kieran Quinlan’s book offers not merely a splendid study of a major American author but also a broadly conceived intellectual history of American Catholicism since World War II. . . . I was literally stunned by the freshness and vitality of a work that the general reader, as well as the cloistered scholar, will find inspired, illuminating, and accessible.”—Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of The House of Percy