In his foreword, writing when Europe was already aflame in the Second World War, Percy stated that “while the world I know is crashing to bits, and what with the noise and the cryings-out no man could hear a trumpet blast, much less an idle evening reverie, I will indulge a heart beginning to be fretful by repeating to it the stories it knows and loves of my own country and my own people.”Īnd thus he begins, describing his parents, grandparents, and friends, his upbringing in the bucolic Mississippi Delta, his schooling, his years of college at the University of the South (where he lost his Christian faith, never to be recovered) and Harvard, his sojourns to Europe as part of Herbert Hoover’s Commission for Belgian Relief, his experiences as a soldier in the Great War, his disillusioning involvement in Mississippi politics, his work in providing relief to an entire region dispossessed by the Great Flood of 1927, his thoughts on contemporary race relations, and much else besides. It was written by the 53-year-old attorney and poet of Greenville, Mississippi at a time when he could look back on a full life, the heritage of a proud, good family, and a time of immense transition in the Deep South, and ruminate on the people he had known, the journey he had taken, the life he had led, and the effects of post-Reconstruction Southern culture as it was gnawed by the tooth of Time. L anterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy’s eloquent autobiography, has been a minor classic since its initial publication in 1941.
Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son
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