Eugene Walter’s first novel, and winner of the 1954 Lippincott Fiction Prize for Young Novelists, is about a young man from a small central Alabama town who goes south of the “salt line” to Mobile to work in a bank and study law. As soon as this unnamed pilgrim arrives, he realizes that—although he is still in Alabama—he has entered a separate physical kingdom of banana trees and palm fronds, subtropical heat and humidity, and old houses and lacy wrought-iron balconies. In Mobile, Alabama, the town that can claim the oldest Mardi Gras in America, there is no Puritan work ethic; the only ruling forces are those of chaos, craziness, and caprice. Such forces overtake the pilgrim, seduce him away from the beaten career path, and set him on a zigzag course through life.

The Untidy Pilgrim celebrates the insularity as well as the eccentricity of southerners—and Mobilians, in particular—in the mid-twentieth century. Cut off from the national mainstream, they are portrayed as devoid of that particularly American angst over what to “do” and accomplish with one’s life, and indulge instead in art, music, cooking, nature, and love. In this novel Walter dispels the gloomy southern literary tradition established by Faulkner, Capote, and McCullers to illuminate the joyous quirkiness of human existence.

Eugene Walter (1921–1988) was a renowned author, editor, gourmet cook, actor, gardener, and translator. A Mobile native, he helped found the Paris Review and the Transatlantic Review and won several literary awards, including a Rockefeller-Sewanee Fellowship, and an O. Henry citation. Among his best-known books are Monkey Poems and The Byzantine Riddle, as well as several best-selling cookbooks.

"Superb, casual imagery . . . obviously, a novel for the sensitive."

—Library Journal

"Picking up The Untidy Pilgrim, now 70 years since its original publication, for a reread, I was chagrined to realize I had never in fact read it before. I only thought I had. . . Now I have read it, and it is delightful. . . Several scenes are set in Bayou Claire, Bayou La Batre, at the estate of uncle Acis, another marvelous eccentric—the novel is full of them."

—Don Noble from Alabama Public Radio

 

“The novel has its moments of great pathos and a vein of poetry, too; much superbly comic dialogue and comic incident. . . .  It is unusually good fun.”
—Atlantic Monthly

“A remarkable first novel. It created a great stir of appreciation in the Paris cafés when it came out in the 1950s and its reissue should do so again in places both far and near.”
—Paris Review

"A zanier bunch of characters has seldom been collected between the covers of a novel. And yet, eccentric though they may be, it is impossible not to love them."

—New York Times