William Gilmore Simms

In the first reissue of these documents since 1865, A City Laid Waste captures in riveting detail the destruction of South Carolina's capital city. William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), a native South Carolinian and one of the nation's foremost men of letters, was in Columbia and witnessed firsthand the city's capture and destruction. A renowned novelist and poet, who was also an experienced journalist and historian, Simms deftly recorded the events of February 1865 in a series of eyewitness accounts published in the first ten issues of the Columbia Phoenix and reprinted here. His record of burned buildings constitutes the most authoritative information available on the extent of the damage. Simms historian David Aiken provides a historical and literary context for Simms's reportage. In his introduction Aiken clarifies the significance of Simms's articles and draws attention to factors most important for understanding the occupation's impact on the city of Columbia.

This title includes three gems of 19th century Southern regional humor. The writings of William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) provide a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all of its regional diversity. Simms' account of the region is more comprehensive than that of any other author of his time; he treats the major intellectual and social issues of the South and depicts the bonds and tensions among all of its inhabitants. By the mid-1840s Simms' novels were so well known that Edgar Allan Poe could call him 'the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced'. The twelfth volume in the on-going Arkansas Edition of the works of William Gilmore Simms, ""Backwoods Tales"" brings together three of the best examples of his comic writing. All were written during the last decade of Simms's life, when he had become a master of his craft. These three tales belong in the tradition of Southern backwoods humor, a genre that flourished before the Civil War and produced classic tales by such authors as George Washington Harris, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. ""Paddy McGann"", ""Sharp Snaffles"", and ""Bill Bauldy"" are all frame tales, told by rustic narrators in authentic dialect, with frequent pauses for libation and comment. These three pieces of writing, never before published together, stand among the best examples of American humor of the nineteenth century. Keen Butterworth, an emeritus member of the English department at the University of South Carolina, has published on Simms, Faulkner, Warren, and other Southern writers. He has recently written about Louis Armstrong for the Southern Review and is currently pursuing projects in fiction and poetry. James L. West III is General Editor and John Caldwell Guilds is General Editor ""Emeritus of the Arkansas Edition of Simms' works"".