SOURCE: "Southern Autobiography," in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 24, April 5, 1941, pp. 24, 26.

In the following essay, Gold offers a positive review of Lanterns on the Levee, assessing it as an accurate portrayal of the South and its problems.

William Alexander Percy was born in Greenville, on the Mississippi Delta, in 1885. That was one year before Henry W. Grady made his famous speech called "The New South"—a phrase used many times since to mean many different things. Grady pleaded for an end to sectional hatred and asked the South to look ahead rather than backward and he argued that the South's agricultural economy ought to be leavened with industry so that the region could end its colonial dependence on the manufacturing North. Men still find it necessary to beg for realism and a balanced economy in the South.

If we are to judge by his autobiography...