SOURCE: "The Dispossessed Garden of William Alexander Percy," in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, Winter, 1991, pp. 31-41.

In the following essay, Dupuy discusses "the garden, " both as a physical reality and as a metaphor on several levels, in Lanterns on the Levee.

It's getting too late for facts anyway and they have a way these days of looking like the Gorgon's head seen without the mirror Perseus used. The garden's the place.

W. A. Percy, Lanterns on the Levee

Will Percy's garden was a busy place. It not only welcomed luminaries like William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Harry Stack Sullivan and Langston Hughes, but ladies from the garden club often dropped by to discuss their petunias (Baker 160). It was photographed by National Geographic, yet it provided Percy with the "best sort of Ivory Tower" (Lanterns 334). Important to his life, the garden is central to his autobiography as well. Percy...