SOURCE: "Mourning and Melancholia: Will Percy and the Southern Tradition," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, Spring, 1977, pp. 248-64.

In the following essay, King examines Lanterns on the Levee as a historical document that presences for posterity the South of the early twentieth century.

Capping as they did a decade of intense regional introspection, the early 1940's saw a remarkable proliferation of works by Southerners about the South. In 1942 William Faulkner published his last great work, Go Down Moses, an extended effort at moral and historical analysis. But the year preceding was perhaps even more fruitful, at least in quantity, for it had seen three unique, even idiosyncratic attempts to encompass the Southern present and past: W. J, Cash's The Mind of the South, James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee.

Of these four works Percy's has received...