ABSTRACT
William Gilmore Simms was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a prolific writer of poems, histories, essays, biographies, and novels. His first novels, Guy Rivers, The Yemassee, and The Partisan were received with great acclaim, at times being reviewed as superior even to the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. Of Mr. Cooper little or nothing was known, by the American people at large, until the publication of The Spy. To a few, perhaps, the novel of Precaution had brought him acquainted. Mr. Cooper failed egregiously in Precaution. The action of the several fleets in the several progresses of the sea, is, in truth, the only portion of the work on which Mr. Cooper has exercised himself. The Sea and American Forest Tales of Mr. Cooper, were at length superseded, when this gentleman visited Europe, by others of a very different class.
