The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

In The Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy asks a hard question: Why is it that modern people-so educated, so prosperous-are so unhappy and ill at ease in the world? To answer it, he turns to such various yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, the nature of tourism, and the incredible Delta Factor, in which he explains how language is at the heart of human personality. Confronting philosophical quandaries with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with insights into the way that language possesses us all.