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,...

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...

Pirates and Devils, edited by Nicholas G. Meriwether and David W. Newton, presents two of the most significant unfinished works by William Gilmore Simms, a prominent public intellectual of the antebellum South and one of the most prolific literary writers of the nineteenth century. These two incomplete works--the pirate romance, "The Brothers of the Coast," and the folk fable, "Sir Will O' Wisp"--are representative of the some of the last major primary texts of Simms's expansive career. Recent scholarship about Simms, including William Gilmore Simms's Unfinished Civil War, reasserts the...