Edgar Allan Poe considered him the best writer in America.
He was known and revered by Poe, Cooper, Bryant and many other literary luminaries of the time.
He stimulated many of the best Southern writers of the day to work and publish, and influenced later generations of scribblers.
He wrote 82 books, including historical romances, translations, 19 volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, several biographies, a history of South Carolina, a volume of literary criticism and five volumes of collected letters, and, at least one of his several plays was produced and well attended.
As if all this were not enough, he was also a lawyer, state legislator, planter, magazine and newspaper editor.
Yet, today, his name is nearly forgotten – even in his beloved South Carolina – except by a few scholars and literary cranks.
This genius of American letters was William Gilmore Simms.
Simms was a child prodigy who rose from obscurity to national and even world fame and then plummeted to obscurity after his death. Although his name is seldom heard today, his influence has continued to the present in the work of such prominent Southern regionalists as Faulkner, Styron and Welty.
Born April 17, 1806, Simms was virtually orphaned at the age of two when his mother died. He was raised by his grandmother while his father went off with Andrew Jackson to fight in the Creek Indian war.
Growing up lonely and impoverished, Simms soaked up stories of the Revolutionary War from his grandmother who had lived through it. Later these tales, enriched by his fertile imagination formed the basis for some of his finest novels. History became his lifelong passion and his novels were noted for fastidious attention to fact.
After but four years of public schooling, Simms entered the College of Charleston at the age of 10, already fluent enough in Latin, German, French and Spanish to dabble in translation. Simms began his formal literary career composing poetry as he rowed a boat evenings in Charleston harbor, publishing his first work in newspapers of the city when he was 16.
At 18, Simms left Charleston on the first of his wanderings, crossing the mountains to visit his father who had settled as a planter in Mississippi. Simms vicariously relived his father’s Indian-fighting adventures and together they explored the Yazoo wilderness and visited with the Creek and Cherokee.
After a brief period as a druggist’s apprentice, Simms published his first volume of poetry when he was 19, the same year he assumed editorship of a magazine in Charleston and began to read law. He was admitted to the bar two years later, becoming one of a flock of Charleston lawyers who also wrote.
Simms was filled with the restless spirit of the times. He spent years wandering, dividing his time between his law and magazine offices in Charleston and his plantation, The Woodlands, on the Edisto River, in appropriate seasons and taking off at odd times during the year on publishing visits North and researching sojourns throughout the Southern wilderness. On these solitary journeys he mingled freely with elite, literary, odd and wild characters, many of whom later peopled the pages of his books.
Among Simms’ best works is the series, The Partisan, The Forayers, and Woodcraft which provides a vivid portrait of the Swamp Fox, Marion, and his fellow partisans in the Revolution; the unforgettable ghost story, Castle Dismal, and The Yamassee, which depicts the Indian war that nearly destroyed the fledgling Carolina colony in 1715. In Yamassee his masterly ability as a storyteller is overshadowed by his ethnological and historical knowledge, though at no loss to the reader.
Simms was extraordinarily prolific (one publisher complained he wrote more copy in half an hour than the printers could set up in a week), a factor that contributed to occasional carelessness in construction. Still, his prose is picaresque and masculine, as readable today as when he wrote it.
At the height of his fame, Simms was compared to Scott and Cooper and his books were published in England and Germany. Yet he was a prophet without honor at home where many thought he was wasting his time writing about local history. His letters to contemporaries reveal this neglect was a source of much personal chagrin.
Tragedy was a keynote of his last years. Though the general had given orders for The Woodlands to be spared, the house and Simms’ 10,000 book library were destroyed in Sherman’s march. This, plus the death of his second wife, and the defeat of the Confederacy were shattering blows from which he never fully recovered. He died of tuberculosis on June 11, 1870.
With his death, Simms’ fame dissipated and his books are difficult to find today. Fortunately, some university presses have begun reprinting some of his work. And, in 1993, the William Gilmore Simms Society was founded at the University of Arkansas with the goal of providing information and facilitating communication among scholars.
“Strong of will and large of heart, strikingly handsome, prodigally generous, he was the living emblem in letters of all that made one love the South, its spendthrift energy, its carelessness, lavishness and warmth,” Van Wyck Brooks said of Simms.
This gallant man whose aim was the preservation of the history of the heroic age of the South has been too long underestimated by literary historians and the people he most loved – his fellow Southerners.
(This article was originally published in Literary Sketches)
