William Alexander Percy

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William Alexander Percy (May 14, 1885 – January 21, 1942) was a lawyer, planter, and poet from Greenville, Mississippi.

Lanterns, an autobiography of Levee (Knopf 1941), became a best-selling book.

LeRoy Percy, the last Mississippi Senator to be elected by the legislature, was the last Senator from Mississippi.

The younger Percy argued for the Roman Catholicism of his French mother in a largely Protestant province.

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Life and career

He was born in Camille, a French Catholic, and LeRoy Percy, a Mississippi planter class, and he grew up in Greenville. In 1910, his father was elected as a US senator. He was a leader and planter at 20,000 acres under cultivation for cotton at the Episcopal University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a postbellum tradition in his family. He graduated in 1904 as the fourth of a classmate.

He spent a year in Paris before transferring to Harvard for a law degree. Percy joined his father's firm in the field of law after returning to Greenville.

Percy joined the Commission for Refugee in Belgium in November 1916, during World War I. He served in Belgium as a delegate until the withdrawal of American troops after the US declaration of war in April 1917. In World War I, he served in the US Army and earned the rank of Captain and Croix de Guerre.

Percy edited the Yale Younger Poets series, the first of its kind in the United States, from 1925 to 1932. He has also published four volumes of poetry with Yale University Press. Percy, a Southern gentleman of letters, befriended many fellow writers, including William Faulkner, as a Southern, Northern, and European writer. He socialized with Langston Hughes and others who were involved in and about the Harlem Renaissance. Percy, also known as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, 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 by suicides, including LeRoy Pratt Percy's first cousin and his widow Martha Susan (Mattie Sue) Percy, who died in a car crash. After being orphaned, William adopted Walker, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin) Percy. All three of them flourished as adults. Walker converted from a medical doctor to a best-selling author. Roy married Sarah Hunt Farish, the daughter of Will Percy's solicitor, Hazlewood Power Farish, who died on May 19. Trail Lake, the Percy family plantation, was under his care. 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 (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1941). He also created "They Cast Their Nets in Galilee," a text that appears in the Episcopal Hymnal (1982) (Hymn 661), as well as the Collected Poems (Knopf 1943). (New York, 1934) A. W. Percy in Men and Boys, an anonymous anthology of Uranian poetry, was published.

"In April Once" (1920), Percy was the playwright behind a one-act scene in a volume of poetry.

During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, a friend of Herbert Hoover of the Belgium Relief Effort was put in charge of relief, although not all New England minus Maine was flooded in the spring. Thousands of blacks, farmers, and plantations that were under water were pushed to flee on the levee in Greenville due to the narrow rim of the levee. Percy believed the refugees need to be evacuated to Vicksburg for better care and food, and he had ordered for ships to destroy them. However, LeRoy Percy and local planters delayed the evacuation, and the refugees on the levee were forced to work in conditions that were similar to slavery. The Colored Advisory Commission, led by Robert Russa Moton, was established to look at crimes that had occurred during the hurricane and identified the Greenville camp as one of the camps where black refugees screamed for poor service.

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