SOURCE: An introduction to Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son, by William Alexander Percy, Louisiana State University Press, 1973, pp. vii-xviii.

In the following essay, an introduction to Lanterns on the Levee, Percy's famous relative expands on the comments he made in his introduction to Sewanee, portions of which constitute the first part of this essay.

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...