William Gilmore Simms:

A Literary Casualty of the Civil War

 

Phebe Davidson

University of South Carolina-Aiken

And

Debra Reddin van Tuyll

Augusta State University

 

 

William Gilmore Simms was an important American literary figure during the antebellum period. Americans at the time easily placed him on par with Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and other great writers of the 19th century. However, as Simms' politics and ideology grew less nationalistic and more sectional, his writings moved away from the mainstream and came to advocate ideas many Americans found repugnant. As a result, Simms fell from the canon of the period. However, his work provides a very clear view of sectional thought in one of the more stormy periods in American history, and for that reason it continues to have value. This paper explores Simms' changing thought

and its impact on his writing and his place in American literary history.