Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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
Review
"This beautifully written biography will appeal to general readers as well as scholars of gay history and the South."
-Library Journal
Review
"[Wise] highlights Percy's dedication to his adopted family and intellectual pursuits, rendering his subject a compellingly complex character."
-Publishers Weekly
Review
"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
Review
"An excellent biography."
-Memphis Magazine
Review
"Biographies such as Wise's are more than true--not because they tell us people like William Alexander Percy exist, but because they tell us people like William Alexander Percy may, with time and a certain stoic resolve, slay their demons. . . . That Wise gives so effective and well-balanced an account of the deeply conflicted Percy is remarkable; that he does so with such lucid style is rare still."
-Oxford American
Review
"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
Review
"[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
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 an easily take nothing less a lifetime to begin to be understood. . . . A major contribution to southern history and the history of gender and sexuality."
-Journal of American History
Review
"Wise writes throughout in clean, readable prose, deploys jargon sparingly and strategically, and rarely becomes repetitive, usually with key argumentative points."
-Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Review
"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
Review
"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
About the Author
Benjamin E. Wise is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.