Volume 42, Number 11 · June 22, 1995
We Unhappy Few
By C. Vann Woodward
The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family
by Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Oxford University Press, 454 pp., $30.00
The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender, and the Southern Imagination
by Bertram Wyatt-Brown
University of Georgia Press, 110 pp., $19.95
For two generations and more the Old South's upper crust—call them planters, gentry, aristocracy, cavaliers, or simply the ruling class—along with their New South heirs have been rather an embarrassment to historians of the region. Before the 1930s, historians as a rule joined with novelists, poets, and movie makers in treating them with a respect bordering on reverence. Heroes of the Lost Cause shared those favors. W.J. Cash was perhaps the last Southern writer of influence who dared write such a line as 'Softly, do you not hear behind that the gallop of Jeb Stuart's cavalrymen?'
Review, 4540 words
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