ABSTRACT
William Gilmore Simms was born in Charleston in 1806, the son of an Irish immigrant father. He maintained an intimate association with the city, and after his death in 1870 his body was interred in Magnolia Cemetery on its outskirts. Ever since the Southern defeat in the Civil War, Simms has remained an obscure figure in American letters, cited chiefly as an eloquent defender of all things Southern, including slavery. He was, indeed, the Old South’s major literary champion, but he was also a prolific novelist, a competent poet and an insightful critic, fully conversant with contemporary trends in literature in both Britain and the Northern United States. His fiction withstands comparison with that of all but the best of contemporary New England writers. He founded and edited several magazines, and presided over the Russell’s Bookstore Group, by far the most talented community of writers in the antebellum South to identify with the Southern cause and sympathize with what they saw as the region’s distinctive genre de vie. Apart from occasional travels in the North, he never left Charleston or his rural retreat at Woodlands plantation in its hinterland. Although he married into Charleston society, much has been made of his apparent feelings of rejection at the hands of the city’s elite. He died lamenting what was later to be called the Lost Cause of the South, and in
despair of his life’s mission: the creation in his time of a Southern literary tradition.
