Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0380377969, Paperback)

Williston Bibb Barrett is the last gentleman, a twenty-five-year-old wanderer from the South living in New York City with no plans for the future and detached roots from his past. The simple purchase of a telescope one summer day changes his life. For while searching for an elusive peregrine falcon in Central Park, Will accidentally spots a beautiful young woman and falls madly and hopelessly in love. And so begins the last gentleman's quest for home, identity, and the meaning of contemporary life.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0312243081, Paperback)

Will Barrett is a 25-year-old wanderer from the South living in New York City, detached from his roots and with no plans for the future, until the purchase of a telescope sets off a romance and changes his life forever.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0679602720, Hardcover)

"The Last Gentleman is lovely and brilliant...a highly whimsical kind of picaresque tale that puts one in mind of both Faulkner and Camus," wrote Joyce Carol Oates when Walker Percy's novel was first published in 1966.
    Williston Bibb Barrett, the last gentleman of the story, is a displaced Southerner who has dropped out of Princeton owing to a nervous condition that his psychoanalyst associates with an inability to fit into groups. While living in New York City, our wayfarer-hero falls in love with a young woman he spies through a telescope...and sets out on a cross-country odyssey in search of home, identity, and the meaning of contemporary life.
    "The Last Gentleman is a fantastically intuitive report on how America feels to the touch," said Wilfrid Sheed. "Page-for-page and line-for-line this is certainly one of the best-written books in recent memory. As a Southern writer, Percy inherits the remains of a sonorous musical language. But beyond that, his unique point of view forms beautiful sentences like a diamond cutting glass." Alfred Kazin agreed: "Percy is a natural writer, downright, subtle, mischievous . . . a philosopher among novelists."
     With a new Introduction by Robert Coles.
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