SOURCE: An introduction to Sewanee, by William Alexander Percy, Frederic C. Beil, 1982, pp. vii-xv.

In the following essay, an introduction to his cousin's Sewanee, Percy offers his personal recollections of the man who raised him from the age of fourteen.

I remember the first time I saw him. I was thirteen and he had come to visit my mother and me and my brothers in Athens, Georgia, where we were living with my grandmother after my father's death.

We had heard of him, of course. He was the fabled relative, the one you liked to speculate about. His father was a United States senator and he had been a decorated infantry officer in World War I. Besides that, he was a poet. The fact that he was also a lawyer and a planter didn't cut much ice—after all, the South was full of lawyer-planters. But how many...