From the expeditions of de Soto in the sixteenth century to the celebrated work of such contemporary poets and prose writers as Maya Angelou and Ellen Gilchrist, Arkansas has enjoyed a rich history of letters. These voices have been, and still are, as various as the state's geography -- the Delta, the Arkansas River Valley, the Ouachita Mountains, and the Ozark Plateau. Available in two volumes, this anthology of writers from various genres -- journals, travel writing, biography, history, poetry, fiction -- reflects the state's unity as well as its sometimes extreme cultural, political, and...

Literary writings that reveal nineteenth-century perceptions of Native Americans; Novelist William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) and the Indians who lived in the southeast United States during the nineteenth century have shared a similar and unfortunate fate - both have been largely neglected in mainstream scholarship of literature and ethnohistory. In a volume that remedies this oversight, John Caldwell Guilds, an authority on Simms, and Charles Hudson, an authority on Southeastern Indians, collaborate to reveal fresh perspectives on both. They offer an anthology of Simms's writings that...

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...