Author: William Alexander PercyPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Book Description
Enzio's Kingdom
Author: William Alexander PercyPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Book Description
Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817-1967
Author: Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617034183
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 520
Book Description
The Double Dealer
Author: The Percys of Mississippi
Author: Lewis BakerPublisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807125137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Set in the twilight years of southern aristocracy, The Percys of Mississippi is a biography of a family in whose bloodline ran both a strong commitment to public service and an equally strong but more private dedication to literature. Following four generations of Percy family history, Lewis Baker chronicles the lives and public careers of Colonel William Alexander Percy, a planter and lawyer; his son LeRoy, a lawyer and United States Senator; LeRoy’s son Will, a poet and lawyer; and Will’s nephew and adopted son, the novelist Walker Percy. Known as the “gray eagle of the delta” for his piercing eyes and silver hair, Colonel Percy served as a Confederate officer in both the eastern and western campaigns of the Civil War. He returned home to practice law and manage the family’s property, but he was soon drawn into the arena of state politics, where he fought vigorously to strengthen the Mississippi River levee system and to protect his district from the perils of Reconstruction. With Colonel Percy’s death in 1888, LeRoy Percy inherited his father’s law practice and his mantle of leadership in the community. LeRoy used his power as a United States Senator to continue his father’s long quest for an adequate levee system; struggled to loosen the Ku Klux Klan’s grip of fear on the delta; and campaigned tirelessly to discredit the divisive creed of the state’s rising demagogue politicians. In the election of 1911, LeRoy Percy was defeated in his bid to be returned to the Senate, losing to the flamboyant demagogue James Kimble Vardaman, the “White Chief.” It was a defeat echoed across the South throughout the dawning years of the twentieth century, as poorer whites rejected the moderate counsel of the planter class, their traditional leaders, and embraced the demagogues’ fiery gospel of resentment. It was this troubling, altered South that LeRoy Percy bequeathed to his son William Alexander. Will Percy fought in World War I, taught for a time, and stood at his father’s side throughout many of the battles to safeguard the delta from extremism. But Will’s true calling was as a poet, and his lasting contribution to the delta would be in the form of a memorial to its past—his memoir Lanterns on the Levee. “During my day,” he wrote Will Percy not long before his death, “ I have witnessed the disintegration of that moral cohesion of the South which had given it its strength and its sons their singleness of purpose and simplicity.” It would be left to Walker Percy to fully confont htis modern, disintegrated South; to seek in such works as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and The Second Coming the place of the Percy family’s values in a world that has little use for aristocrats.
William Alexander Percy
Author: Benjamin E. WisePublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807869953
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
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.
The Fourth Ghost
Author: Robert H. BrinkmeyerPublisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807134805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system. As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art. The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.
The Bookman
Author: The House of Percy
Author: Bertram Wyatt-BrownPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195109821
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 499
Book Description
Although the novels of Walker Percy represent some of the most prominent work in 20th-century Southern fiction, the Percy family itself has a history that is arguably as compelling as anything he could have created. Behind Percy's prose lurks a legacy of wealth, literary accomplishment, political leadership, depression, and suicide that spans two centuries. In this compelling biography, Wyatt-Brown skilfully combines intensive research and telling insights to produce the unforgettable story of this gifted family. 48 halftones.
Walker Percy
Author: William Rodney AllenPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617035357
Category : Psychoanalysis and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Book Description
A Southern Renaissance
Author: Richard H. KingPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195365305
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
Book Description
This perceptive study of a major cultural movement shows how Southern writers of 1930 t0 1955 tried to come to terms with Southern tradition, and discusses the resulting body of significant literature - fiction, poetry, memoirs, and historical writing.