William Gilmore Simms s (18061870) body of work, which provides a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all its regional diversity, complete with its literary and intellectual issues, is probably more comprehensive than that of any other nineteenth-century southern author. By the mid1840s his novels were so famous that Edgar Allan Poe wrote that Simms was the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced. Simms wrote eight novels that were set in his home state of South Carolina during the Revolutionary War, and Eutaw, the sixth, was published in...