Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy

Walker Percy became a medical doctor and a best-selling author. William adopted his cousin's children, Walker, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin) Percy, after they were orphaned. Percy's family was plagued with suicides, including that of his first cousin LeRoy Pratt Percy and possibly his wife Martha Susan (Mattie Sue) Phinizy Percy, who died in a car accident. Percy was a sort of godfather to the Fugitives at Vanderbilt, or Southern Agrarians, as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren often were called. He socialized with Langston Hughes and other people in and about the Harlem Renaissance. A Southern man of letters, Percy befriended many fellow writers, Southern, Northern and European, including William Faulkner. He also published four volumes of poetry with the Yale University Press. Army in World War I, earning the rank of Captain and the Croix de Guerre.įrom 1925 to 1932, Percy edited the Yale Younger Poets series, the first of its kind in the country. He served in Belgium as a delegate until the withdrawal of American personnel upon the US declaration of war in April 1917. After returning to Greenville, Percy joined his father's firm in the practice of law.ĭuring World War I, Percy joined the Commission for Relief in Belgium in November 1916. He spent a year in Paris, then went to Harvard for a law degree. As an attorney and planter with 20,000 acres under cultivation for cotton, he was very influential at the Episcopal university, The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a postbellum tradition in his family.

He was born to Camille, a French Catholic, and LeRoy Percy, of the planter class in Mississippi, and grew up in Greenville. In a largely Protestant state, the younger Percy championed the Roman Catholicism of his French mother. His father LeRoy Percy was the last United States Senator from Mississippi elected by the legislature. His autobiography Lanterns on the Levee ( Knopf 1941) became a bestseller. William Alexander Percy (– January 21, 1942), was a lawyer, planter, and poet from Greenville, Mississippi.

Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy