Introduction

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This special issue focuses on William Gilmore Simms (1806-70), an antebellum Southern writer who was one of the most prominent literary figures of his time but who for many complicated reasons has lost his place in the canon. Author of more than 80 books, he especially impressed critics with some of his historical romances such as The Yemassee (1835) and works of poetry such as Atalantis (1832), but he practiced all genres, including biography, history, drama, and criticism. He also published lectures, wrote six volumes of letters, and edited several newspapers and literary journals. He was a true public intellectual. In 1845 while reviewing Simms's short stories, Edgar Allan Poe called him "the best novelist which this country has, upon the whole, produced" (qtd. in Butterworth 64), and in 1849 the influential New York critic Evert Duyckinck praised Simms for having "the poetical faculty in something more than an ordinary degree" (qtd. in Butterworth 77). In discussing Simms's volume of poetry Areytos, Poe also lauded his verse as "natural and forcible" and considered Simms "one of our most original writers" (31, 32). In addition, Nathaniel Hawthorne considered Simms's essays equal "to the best of such productions" and said they "abound in brilliant paragraphs," though Simms lacked "genius" (qtd. in Butterworth 68). After the Civil War, however, Simms fell into the "long years of neglect," which John Caldwell Guilds helped rectify in his edited collection of essays of the same name and in his literary biography, Simms: A Literary Life, the first biography in a hundred years. In the last 15 years, the renaissance in Simms scholarship has continued. Books treating his fiction (Wimsatt, Nakamura, and Watson), poetry (Kibler), history …