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 (18851942) 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. Wises exploration brings depth and new meaning to Percys already compelling life story his prominent familys 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 Percys 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 Wises hands these seemingly disparate worlds become one.