William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker

by Benjamin E. Wise

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807869956
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	03/12/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Benjamin E. Wise is associate professor of history at the University of Florida.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A groundbreaking book. This fiercely intelligent and elegantly written biography fully contextualizes Percy's life as it raises some of the largest issues of the times. It will prove a milestone in Southern history, with considerable impact as well in American studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, and queer history.—John Howard, King's College London

William Alexander Percy is unquestionably one of the more interesting figures of the American South in the early twentieth century. Poet, planter, lawyer, valiant World War I veteran, memoirist, adoptive father to three young cousins, he also led a largely clandestine life as a gay man in a region and culture that had little tolerance for sexual difference. Yet as Benjamin Wise's much needed biography shows, the whole of Percy's life was informed by that difference, including his determination to be the kind of man his society and family would esteem. There was sadness in such a life, to be sure, but there were also great accomplishments and even times of great joy. Wise has done justice to the achievements and complexities of this remarkable man.—Jay Tolson, news director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and author of Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy

Editorial Reviews

Born to aristocratic parents in the Mississippi Delta just after the Reconstruction, William Alexander Percy grew up to be a poet, lawyer, and briefly a soldier in WWI, all the while trying to " out spaces of sexual freedom" to accommodate his homosexuality. Despite an acute awareness of his own difference, Percy played willing host to the racism of his forebears. But as Wise tells it, the great challenge of Percy's life was negotiating an identity that could reconcile notions of Southern manhood with what one newspaper of the day called the "open secret" of Percy's queerness. At times Wise describes mundane events in overwhelming detail, and occasionally he abruptly zooms out to address context. While jarring, these transitions speak to the difficulty of examining his subject, whose papers were heavily edited by his executor (his adopted son Roy), prompting Wise to posit that the pattern of the blanks "suggests that ‘loving father' and ‘homosexual' was an incongruity his family could not reconcile." Nevertheless, the author skillfully reveals the extent to which Percy was able to sustain relationships with gay men, both abroad and at home. Wise is frank about the elitism and safety afforded by Percy's wealth, but he also highlights Percy's dedication to his adopted family and intellectual pursuits, rendering his subject a compellingly complex character. Halftone photos. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

This beautifully written biography will appeal to general readers as well as scholars of gay history and the South.—Library Journal

[Wise] highlights Percy's dedication to his adopted family and intellectual pursuits, rendering his subject a compellingly complex character.—Publishers Weekly

An excellent biography.—Memphis Magazine

Wise's crisp and clear articulation of Percy's views of love and sexuality will attract the attention of scholars and general readers far beyond the field of southern studies.—Southern Spaces

Wise's biography [is] the first full-length treatment of Percy to foreground his homosexuality from start to finish. There is still a lot of speculation here, but there's also a lot of sound, fundamental archival research that is placed effectively within a broad social and cultural history of homosexual identity and practice in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in both Mississippi and the world at large. This is truly a groundbreaking biography.—Virginia Quarterly Review

Wise's book succeeds because it is smart, thorough, and gorgeously written. It also succeeds because, unlike so many of the people who have written about Percy in the past, Wise clearly understands the difference between sex, which is comparatively easy to write about, and sexuality, which can easily take nothing less than a lifetime to begin to be understood. . . . A major contribution to southern history and the history of gender and sexuality.—Journal of American History

[An] elegant, engaging, and highly recommended book. It is a major contribution to southern history and the history of gender and sexuality.—Journal of American History

Wise has taken William Alexander Percy, a somewhat shadowed anachronistic figure, and turned him into a richly understood, interesting person. This is a distinguished biography.—Journal of Southern History

Wise will change not only the way that historians think about Percy but also about sexuality in the early twentieth-century South. A product of immense research and artful reading. . . . This book deserves a wide readership.—American Historical Review

From the Publisher

There is no question that William Alexander Percy (1885–1942) led a fascinating life. Born to a wealthy Mississippi Delta family (his father was a U.S. senator, plantation owner, and lawyer), Will, as he was known, was educated at Sewanee and Harvard. He was also gay and a bit effeminate, at a time when to be so in the Deep South was extremely problematic. Nevertheless, he did not flee his hometown of Greenville; though he became a world traveler (he made an important contribution to President Herbert Hoover's mission for the relief of Belgium in 1915), he always returned. He held his region together during the great Mississippi flood of 1927. He was also deeply devoted to his family: after his favorite cousin died, he adopted the deceased's three sons, including future famous novelist Walker Percy. He himself was a published poet, and his autobiographical Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (1941) became a bestseller. Wise reminds us that Percy, like many of his Southern compatriots, was very much a racist as well as, to some degree, a Southern nationalist. VERDICT This beautifully written biography will appeal to general readers as well as scholars of gay history and the South.—David S. Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia

Library Journal