William Alexander Percy, was a lawyer, planter, and poet from Greenville, Mississippi. His autobiography Lanterns on the Levee became a bestseller. His father LeRoy Percy was the last United States Senator from Mississippi elected by the legislature. In a largely Protestant state, the younger Percy championed the Roman Catholicism of his French mother.
Life and career
He was born to Camille, a French Catholic, and LeRoy Percy, of the planter class in Mississippi, and grew up in Greenville. His father was elected as US senator in 1910. As an attorney and planter with 20,000 acres under cultivation for cotton, he was very influential at the Episcopal university, in Sewanee, Tennessee, a postbellum tradition in his family. He spent a year in Paris before going to Harvard for a law degree. After returning to Greenville, Percy joined his father's firm in the practice of law. During World War I, Percy joined the Commission for Relief in Belgium in November 1916. He served in Belgium as a delegate until the withdrawal of American personnel upon the US declaration of war in April 1917. He served in the US Army in World War I, earning the rank of Captain and the Croix de Guerre. From 1925 to 1932, Percy edited the Yale Younger Poets series, the first of its kind in the country. He also published four volumes of poetry with the Yale University Press. 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. Percy's family was plagued with suicides, including that of his first cousin LeRoy Pratt Percy and possibly his wife, Martha Susan Phinizy Percy, who died in a car accident. William adopted his cousin's children, Walker, LeRoy and Phinizy Percy, after they were orphaned. As adults, all three prospered. Walker became a medical doctor and a best-selling author. Roy married Sarah Hunt Farish, the daughter of Will Percy's law partner, Hazlewood Power Farish. He took charge of the Percy family plantation, Trail Lake. Phin married and moved to New Orleans to practice law. Percy's most well-known work is his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. His other works include the text of "They Cast Their Nets in Galilee," which is included in the Episcopal Hymnal , and the Collected Poems. One of his pieces was published under the name A. W. Percy in Men and Boys, an anonymous anthology of Uranian poetry. Percy was the playwright behind a one-act scene in a volume of poetry, "In April Once". A friend of Herbert Hoover from the Belgium Relief Effort during the early years of World War I, Percy was put in charge of relief during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, when an area larger than all New England minus Maine was flooded in the spring. During the flood, thousands of blacks, fleeing farms and plantations under water, sought refuge on the levee in Greenville. Percy believed that the refugees needed to be evacuated to Vicksburg to receive better care and food, and he arranged for ships to prepare to remove them.
Legacy and honors
The William Alexander Percy Library at 341 Main Street, Greenville, Mississippi is named for him.
