He passed away last night, at the age of 88.

You know him, of course, as a Civil War historian and narrator of the Ken Burns series. Some of us also know him as one of the late Walker Percy’s closest friends – they met when they were teenagers in Greenville, Mississippi, Walker having moved there, in with his uncle William Alexander Percy, after the death, first of his father, and then his mother. Part of their correspondence is preserved in this book, well worth a read: