With his insight and special writing skills, Will Percy brought to life not only the Mississippi Delta of his time but the entire Southern region as well. He wrote about events from his very young years until the late 1930s. Will Percy was born in 1885, to an aristocratic family of Southern planters in Greenville, Mississippi. This book was published in 1941, long before the serious sanitizing of history began. Of course, there are numerous books about the South that can be acquired by earnest Southern readers, but one that I think should be on every Southern bookshelf is Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, by William Alexander Percy. As a result, Southerners seeking a more impartial account of past events in the South will probably have to purchase books for their own libraries. Also, there’s been a mass migration of Northerners into the South over the last few decades, and, consequently, Southern library selections reflect the tastes of relocated Northerners. Since the 1950s, it has been considered bad form to portray the South favorably. Consequently, most books about “serious” subjects began disappearing from library shelves, being replaced with “pop culture” books.īut, even before these changes, it was difficult to find a book that portrayed the South in an equitable manner, even in Southern libraries. The intellectual interests of most Americans began to diminish, and those Americans who do have intellectual interests, normally use the Internet for research. The books found on library shelves began changing some time ago.
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