Background

William Alexander Percy was born on May 14, 1885, in Greenville, Mississippi, United States, to Camille, a French Catholic, and LeRoy Percy, of the planter class in Mississippi, and grew up in Greenville.

Education

Percy attended the Episcopal University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a postbellum tradition in his family, spent a year in Paris and then earned a law degree from Harvard in 1908 and practised law in his father's firm in Greenville.

In 1939, Percy received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of the South.

Career

Percy joined the Commission for Relief in Belgium in November 1916 and served in Belgium as a delegate until the withdrawal of American personnel upon the U.S. declaration of war in April 1917. He joined the U. S. Army from 1917 to 1919 and trained soldiers in the 92nd Division (the US Army’s first African American division), earning the Croix de Guerre in 1918 and rising to the rank of captain.

From 1925 to 1932 Percy edited the Yale Young Poets series, the first of its kind in the country. He also published four volumes of poetry himself with the Yale University Press.

After LeRoy Percy’s death in 1929, Will Percy took charge of the family and inherited his father’s plantation and business. He became a patron of the arts and paid for various social welfare programs to help African Americans in Greenville.

Achievements

• 

  William Percy was best known as a poet. His most well-known work is his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1941). His other works include the text of "They Cast Their Nets in Galilee," which is included in the Episcopal Hymnal (1982) (Hymn 661), and the Collected Poems (Knopf 1943). One of his pieces was published under the name A.W. Percy in Men and Boys, an anonymous anthology of Uranian poetry (New York, 1934).
  
  Percy was also a playwright behind a one-act scene in a volume of poetry "In April Once" (1920).
  
  The William Alexander Percy Memorial Library was named after him. It includes books and manuscripts from many Greenville Writers.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Lanterns on the Levee

    (This fascinating volume contains the memoirs of William A...)

    1941
  • Poems of Arthur O'shaughnessy

    (This delightful book contains a collection of some of Art...)

    1923
  • In April Once

    (Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)

    1920
  • Sewanee 1982
  • The collected poems of William Alexander Percy 1943
  • Sappho in Levkas and other Poems 1915
  • Enzio's Kingdom and Other Poems 1924

Personality

A Southern man of letters, Percy befriended many fellow writers, Southern, Northern and European, including William Faulkner. He socialized with Langston Hughes and other people in and about the Harlem Renaissance. Percy was a sort of godfather to the Fugitives at Vanderbilt, or Southern Agrarians, as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren were often called.

Connections

Percy never married, and it was widely assumed by many of his contemporaries, though hardly ever mentioned, that he was gay.

Percy's family was also plagued with suicides, including his first cousin LeRoy Pratt Percy and possibly his wife Martha Susan (Mattie Sue) Phinizy Percy, who died in an auto accident. William adopted his cousin's children, Walker, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin) Percy, after they were orphaned.

Father:

LeRoy Percy

His father LeRoy Percy was the last United States Senator from Mississippi elected by the legislature.

Mother:

Camille (Bourges) Percy

stepson:

Walker Percy

stepdaughter:

Phinizy Percy

stepson:

LeRoy Percy

References

• William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker In this evocative biography, Benjamin E. Wise presents the singular life of William Alexander Percy (1885-1942), a queer plantation owner, poet, and memoirist from Mississippi. Though Percy is best known as a conservative apologist of the southern racial order, in this telling Wise creates a complex and surprising portrait of a cultural relativist, sexual liberationist, and white supremacist. We follow Percy as he travels from Mississippi around the globe and, always, back again to the Delta. Wise's exploration brings depth and new meaning to Percy's already compelling life story--his prominent family's troubled history, his elite education and subsequent soldiering in World War I, his civic leadership during the Mississippi River flood of 1927, his mentoring of writers Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, and the writing and publication of his classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee. This biography sets Percy's life and search for meaning in the context of his history in the Deep South and his experiences in the gay male world of the early twentieth century. In Wise's hands, these seemingly disparate worlds become one.
  2014
• The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family The novels of Walker Percy--The Moviegoer, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome to name a few--have left a permanent mark on twentieth-century Southern fiction; yet the history of the Percy family in America matches anything, perhaps, that he could have created. Two centuries of wealth, literary accomplishment, political leadership, depression, and sometimes suicide established a fascinating legacy that lies behind Walker Percy's acclaimed prose and profound insight into the human condition. In The House of Percy, Bertram Wyatt-Brown masterfully interprets the life of this gifted family, drawing out the twin themes of an inherited inclination to despondency and an abiding sense of honor. The Percy family roots in Mississippi and Louisiana go back to "Don Carlos" Percy, an eighteenth-century soldier of fortune who amassed a large estate but fell victim to mental disorder and suicide. Wyatt-Brown traces the Percys through the slaveholding heyday of antebellum Natchez, the ravages of the Civil War (which produced the heroic Colonel William Alexander Percy, the "Gray Eagle"), and a return to prominence in the Mississippi Delta after Reconstruction. In addition, the author recovers the tragic lives and literary achievements of several Percy-related women, including Sarah Dorsey, a popular post-Civil War novelist who horrified her relatives by befriending Jefferson Davis--a married man--and bequeathing to him her plantation home, Beauvoir, along with her entire fortune. Wyatt-Brown then chronicles the life of Senator LeRoy Percy, whose climactic re-election loss in 1911 to a racist demagogue deply stung the family pride, but inspired his bold defiance to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. The author goes on to tell the poignant story of poet and war hero Will Percy, the Senator's son. The weight of this family narrative found expression in Will Percy's memoirs, Lanterns on the Levee--and in the works of Walker Percy, who was reared in his cousin Will's Greenville home after the suicidal death of Walker's father and his mother's drowning. As the biography of a powerful dynasty, steeped in Sou8thern traditions and claims to kinship with English nobility, The House of Percy shows the interrelationship of legend, depression, and grand achievement. Written by a leading scholar of the South, it weaves together intensive resarch and thoughtful insights into a riveting, unforgettable story.
  1994