William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter & Sexual Free Thinker

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 "[carve] 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 %E2%80%98loving father' and %E2%80%98homosexual' 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.)