Editing Walker Percy (section)

=== Friendship with Shelby Foote ===
After moving to Greenville, Mississippi, in 1930, [[Shelby Foote]] became Percy's lifelong best friend. As young men, Percy and Foote decided to visit [[William Faulkner]] in [[Oxford, Mississippi]]. However, when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak. Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation.
{{external media| float = right| video1 = [https://www.c-span.org/video/?77879-1/the-correspondence-s-foote-w-percy Interview with Foote on ''The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy'', December 8, 1996], [[C-SPAN]]}} 
Percy and Foote were classmates at both Greenville High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although Foote was not permitted to join Percy's fraternity because of his partly Jewish heritage, he and Percy stayed close friends during their two overlapping years. They went on dates together, made regular trips to nearby [[Durham, North Carolina]], to drink and socialize, and journeyed to [[New York City]] during one of their semester breaks. When Percy graduated in 1937, Foote dropped out and returned to Greenville.{{sfnp|Tolson|1998|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=6XHf0N6lzxQC&pg=PA4 4]}}

In the late 1940s, Percy and Foote began a correspondence that lasted until Percy's death in 1990. A collection of their correspondence was published in 1996.<ref name="Men of Letters">{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/01/books/men-of-letters.html|title=Men of Letters|newspaper=The New York Times|date=December 1996|last1=Wilson|first1=Robert}}</ref>