At the invitation of his bachelor uncle, Percy and his orphaned brothers moved to Greenville, Mississippi. There he finished his last three years of high school.
His uncle, William Alexander Percy, would exert a profound influence on his oldest nephew. Percy later called him "the most extraordinary man I have ever known." The urbane Uncle Will was a poet and writer, best known for his 1941 memoir, Lanterns on the Levee. An inveterate romantic, he once advised his nephew to set his poems "in some long-ago time" in order to keep them free of "irrelevant photographic details." William Alexander Percy counted among his friends such "agrarian" poets as Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. He shared their resentment of the encroaching industrial and secular North, though he found the modernist technique of their verse unattractive.
Friendship with Foote
When Percy was an adolescent, his uncle invited a local boy named Shelby Foote over to keep him company. Foote, a self-confident young man who had literary aspirations, became one of Percy's closest friends. Their lifelong friendship included voluminous correspondence, the literary record of which was later collected in book form.
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