In this book, Justin N. Bonanno builds off of the recent philosophical work on Walker Percy s writings. While it is valuable to appreciate Percy as a novelist, Bonanno approaches Percy from the perspective of Continental philosophy and the rhetorical tradition. Unpacking the works of several key authors that influenced Percy (e. g. Sartre and Heidegger), Bonanno offers a fresh philosophical account of Percy's ideas concerning the relationship between symbols and existence. In particular, he focuses on how Percy s ideas emerge from the thought of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, Jacques Maritain, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger, Viktor Shklovsky, Søren Kierkegaard, and St. Thomas Aquinas.