I was standing in the lobby of Santa Fe’s historic La Fonda Inn when my wife broke the news. “Walker Percy’s name isn’t in here,” she said, waving a brochure that listed the hotel’s long list of “celebrity guests.”

My exact reply escapes me, but the PG version went something like: “Shirley MacLaine? John Travolta? Are you kidding me?”

Percy’s novels have inspired generations of spiritual seekers and Santa Fe is where he finally found his calling. But in La Fonda’s lore, he’s easily outranked by Robert Duvall, even Larry Hagman.

Somewhere out there in the cosmos, though, I bet that Percy, the old moviegoer himself, is laughing. For in the end, it wasn’t anonymity that he feared but eminence.

Anonymity was all that Percy had when he drove into Santa Fe in the summer of 1946. He was thirty years old and beginning to panic. The heir to an accomplished line of Southern war heroes, lawyers, and poets, Percy was badly adrift. He had abandoned a medical career, done a little writing, dated a lot of women, endlessly pondered his options. It was swiftly adding up to nothing, and he knew it.

He desperately wanted a fresh start, as his biographer Jay Tolson recounts. So he went on a search. Somehow, he found himself-and it all started at La Fonda. It was during a ten-day stay there that Percy, an avowed agnostic, shocked his best friend and fellow writer, Shelby Foote, by hinting at his interest in the Catholicism he eventually embraced. It was at La Fonda that Percy decided to live on a ranch outside Santa Fe. And it was on that ranch, Tolson writes, that Percy awoke one fall morning the same year and suddenly realized, “I’ve got to have a life.” He vowed to write, move to New Orleans, and marry his girlfriend, Bunt Townsend.

Percy kept his promises. His first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award in 1962, and several acclaimed books followed. A central theme in Percy’s work is the “nought” of self-Percy’s notion that our modern selves are empty and hopelessly seeking to fill up on things of the world, chewing up and spitting out the people and objects we encounter. The self, though, worships the rare object it can’t devour. Antiques, for example, are so steeped in an aura of distant times and places that they resist easy explanation and consumption-and Percy worried that he might become one himself.

As Paul Elie writes in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Percy was a prime candidate for becoming “a dead eminence with which his readers would saturate themselves in order to fill their ‘nought’ of self.” This danger was particularly great in New Orleans. “He must have dreaded the thought of the house where he wrote The Moviegoer becoming a stop on literary walking tours,” Elie writes, “of a tavern in the Quarter serving a mixed drink called Love in the Ruins.... Such eminence would undo the work of his adulthood, which was to find rather than fill himself.”

Percy, who died in 1990, wanted his words to endure and his celebrity to fade. In Santa Fe, it has-if it ever existed at all. I went looking for traces of Percy in the city where his dazzling future came calling, and it was as if he’d never even been there. I hoped to fill myself, I suppose, on tangible signs-his favorite spot in the plaza, a preferred walking route-but biographies and even his own writing offer precious little to go on.

There was this: Percy, Tolson tells us, enjoyed lounging at night in La Fonda’s open courtyard. I went there one spring night hoping to soak in the feel of that space. But the courtyard has a roof now, and it’s well lit after dark-no place for a Southern gentleman’s ghost. So I was left merely to wonder at his movements.

Just up the street from La Fonda is the magnificent St. Francis Cathedral, opened in 1884 by the legendary Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy. Percy couldn’t have missed it. I like to picture him there, lean and windblown and bemused, slouching in the great church’s shadows and envying the people who built that holy place before they faded forever into history, leaving only the work of their hands behind. Then it was on to New Orleans, where a new world of eminence awaited.