DIED. Walker Percy, 73, pre-eminent Southern novelist and essayist whose first published novel, The Moviegoer, won a National Book Award for fiction for 1961; of cancer; in Covington, La. His six novels, among them Love in the Ruins and Lancelot, dramatized his chosen theme, "the dislocation of man in the modern age." Alabama-born, Percy forsook his medical training and Protestantism and turned to writing and Roman Catholicism. He spun his existential view of humans into muscular and compelling stories that place him in the Southern pantheon of writers including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Eudora Welty.