Yat is captured over and over again by the New Orleans native John Kennedy Toole’s uncanny ear for mimicry and rhythm in his masterpiece and winner of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for fiction, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” which revolves around the adventures of the corpulent and sometimes slightly delusional Ignatius J. Reilly: “Santa says he likes the communiss because he’s lonely … If he was to ax me to marry him … I wouldn’t haveta think twice about it.” The author himself lived in a simple, one-story house at 7632 Hampson Street, in Uptown-Carrollton, originally built in the late 19th century and undergoing restoration on the October afternoon I strolled by. (Hard-core fans might want to visit the statue of Ignatius J. Reilly in front of the Hyatt on Canal Street, chow down on Lucky Dogs, or take in a movie at the Prytania Theater.)

Just a few blocks from Hampson Street, on a quiet block of unassuming houses, is 1820 Milan Street, where Walker Percy — who was instrumental in getting “A Confederacy of Dunces” published after its author’s suicide — began writing the 1961 National Book Award-winning “The Moviegoer.” The novel follows its narrator’s spiritual journey in the days leading up to his 30th birthday, as he daydreams, meanders and goes to the movies, all in a quest to simply be comfortable as a member of the human race.

Image Walker Percy in his Covington, La., yard in 1977. Credit... Jack Thornell/Associated Press

Percy — who was born in Alabama but lived either in or near New Orleans most of his adult life — felt the city as a kind of fever dream, an atmosphere so redolent, so potent, so dripping in charm and dazzle that it made it difficult for the artist to see past its seductive appearance and get to the messiness of life, which is, after all, the fodder of great literature. In an Esquire essay called “Why I Live Where I Live,” Percy said: “The occupational hazard of the writer in New Orleans is a variety of the French flu, which might also be called the Vieux Carré syndrome. One is apt to … write feuilletons or vignettes or catty romans à clef …” Binx Bolling, the complex, searching, often lonely protagonist of “The Moviegoer,” says that he “can’t stand the old world atmosphere of the French Quarter or the genteel charm of the Garden District” and hence moves to Gentilly, “a middle-class suburb of New Orleans. Except for the banana plants on the patios and the curlicues of iron on the Walgreen drugstore, one would never guess it was a part of New Orleans.”

Perhaps to escape the lure of the literary equivalent of kitsch, Percy also left New Orleans, in his case for Covington, some 40 miles away on the North Shore of Lake Ponchartrain, another “non-place,” in the author’s estimation. Today Covington is a destination charm-spot filled with coffee emporiums and boutiques. But in Percy’s time it was quiet and not at all chic, a place where he lunched at his favorite waffle house and walked his Welsh corgi, Sweet Thing. Here, the author, a Catholic convert, was free to pursue his, and his characters’, search for God in the everyday, whether in Louisiana, as in “Lancelot,” or elsewhere — North Carolina, for example, in “The Second Coming.” In Covington’s leafy historic district, I found myself on Lee Lane, where 19th-century, tin-roofed cottages are now being used mainly as antiques shops.

I tried, but failed, to get a sense of the author at the French Mix, an upscale-furnishings emporium, where, when it was his daughter’s bookshop, the Kumquat, he had an upstairs office. Nor could I find him at St. Joseph Abbey on River Road, where he was an oblate, occasionally attended Mass, and maintained friendships with at least three of the monks — and where he is buried. I did however find excellent, if pricey, iced coffee at Coffee Rani, and realized, once again, that there’s no better place to find Walker Percy than inside the pages of his many dazzling novels, which I’d fallen in love with years ago.