SOURCE: "William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and the Apocalypse," in Another Generation: Southern Fiction since World War II, University Press of Mississippi, 1980, pp. 122-43.

In the following essay, Lawson explores the use of apocalyptic imagery—a specific array of symbols dating back to Joachim of Flora in Medieval times—in the works of both William Alexander Percy and Walker Percy.

In 1924 William Alexander Percy published his third volume of poetry, Enzio's Kingdom and Other Poems. The time for its writing had been snatched from a life that was otherwise given over to public demands. For Percy and his father, former Senator LeRoy Percy, were among those who had been occupied during the past several years in a furious battle to keep the Ku Klux Klan from establishing its control over Mississippi.¹

Will Percy describes in his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee (1941),² the onset of the Klan threat and...