About the Author

Benjamin E. Wise is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.

Reviews

[An] elegant, engaging, and highly recommended book. It is a major contribution to southern history and the history of gender and sexuality.--Journal of American History

[Wise] highlights Percy's dedication to his adopted family and intellectual pursuits, rendering his subject a compellingly complex character.--Publishers Weekly

An excellent biography.--Memphis Magazine

This beautifully written biography will appeal to general readers as well as scholars of gay history and the South.--Library Journal

Wise has taken William Alexander Percy, a somewhat shadowed anachronistic figure, and turned him into a richly understood, interesting person. This is a distinguished biography.--Journal of Southern History

Wise will change not only the way that historians think about Percy but also about sexuality in the early twentieth-century South. A product of immense research and artful reading. . . . This book deserves a wide readership.--American Historical Review

Wise's biography [is] the first full-length treatment of Percy to foreground his homosexuality from start to finish. There is still a lot of speculation here, but there's also a lot of sound, fundamental archival research that is placed effectively within a broad social and cultural history of homosexual identity and practice in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in both Mississippi and the world at large. This is truly a groundbreaking biography.--Virginia Quarterly Review

Wise's book succeeds because it is smart, thorough, and gorgeously written. It also succeeds because, unlike so many of the people who have written about Percy in the past, Wise clearly understands the difference between sex, which is comparatively easy to write about, and sexuality, which can easily take nothing less than a lifetime to begin to be understood. . . . A major contribution to southern history and the history of gender and sexuality.--Journal of American History

Wise's crisp and clear articulation of Percy's views of love and sexuality will attract the attention of scholars and general readers far beyond the field of southern studies.--Southern Spaces