Historical novelist William Gilmore Simms first published The Forayers in 1855 at the peak of his reputation and ability. Simms had set out to create a prose epic through a series of linked novels detailing American history and struggles from early colonization to the mid-nineteenth century. The Forayers, which was the sixth book in his series of eight Revolutionary War novels set in the South, describes events around Orangeburg, South Carolina, before the Battle of Eutaw Springs (itself covered in this novel's sequel, Eutaw). It features such characters as Hell-fire Dick, a hardhearted,...

Praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, The Wigwam and the Cabin focuses on the Southern frontier that Simms knew so well, a frontier whose vernacular, courage, humor, folklore, violence, injustice, and beauty are vividly brought to life through the strokes of his pen. I have seen the life, Simms wrote, -- have lived it -- and much of my material...is the planter, the squatter, the Indian, the negro -- the bold and hardy pioneer, the vigorous yeomen -- these are the subjects. Simms's portrayal of frontier life is the more realistic and graphic in all nineteenth-century American...