Simms

Upon his death in 1870 at the age of sixty-four, William Gilmore Simms was eulogized not only throughout his native state of South Carolina, but also in New York, Cincinnati, Mobile, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Atlanta. Correctly called by Jay B. Hubbell "the central figure in the literature of the Old South," Simms played a major role, as editor and critic as well as author, in encouraging the development of Southern letters; but though quintessentially Southern, Simms. Was also a national literary figure. Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe viewed Simms "in invention, in vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting interest, and in the artistical arrangement of his themes" as surpassing "any of his countrymen." After the Civil War, "long years of neglect" tarnished Simms's reputation, but not his achievement, the magnitude of which is fully demonstrated in John Caldwell Guilds's Simms: A Literary Life, the first full-length biography of Simms. Since 1892. Beginning with Simms's inauspicious birth into a working-class Charleston family, Guilds charts the gradual rise of a complex and headstrong young man into prominence as an admired author and critic and records the personal and political upheavals that helped Simms define his position on the interplay between art and life. Adhering to Simms's own prescription regarding biographies - that they should "be written con amore ... without violating the truth, and. Yet with some softening of its harsher effects"--Simms offers an honest and revealing portrait of this at once insufferable and endearing man who "was well worthy of respect, but hardly of hero-worship" and who, while fulfilling responsibilities as planter, husband, and father, produced no fewer than seventy-two book-length works, including novels, short story collections, poetry, drama, literary criticism, essays, history, and biography. Simms's vision of America. Encompasses ante-colonial America, the English colonies, the Revolutionary War, and the rampaging frontier and constitutes a unique national literary treasure. Guilds's Simms restores Simms to his proper place as a major figure in American letters and reintroduces the man and the author to the reading public.