Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

William Alexander Percy

Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885-1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semi-feudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life — although his life was exciting and varied — but rather in the intimate, honest, and soul-probing record of how he brought himself to contemplate unflinchingly a new and unstable era. The 1973 introduction by Walker Percy — Will's nephew and adopted son — recalls the strong character and easy grace of "the most extraordinary man I have ever known."

"A work of exceptional merit and importance. The high quality of its prose would entitle it to consideration for a permanent place in our literature. . . . Its real significance, however, lies in the candor and completeness of the revelations of the Southern aristocrat's point of view." – New York Times

William Alexander Percy was the author of four books of poetry, and he practiced law in Greenville until his death, one year after the publication of his autobiography. Awarded the Croix de Guerre with gold star for his service in World War I, he also was one of the leaders in the succesful 1922 fight against the Ku Klux Klan in Greenville and headed the local Red Cross unit during the disastrous Mississippi River flooding of 1927.

Publication Date: 2006, originally 1941