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, a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all its regional diversity, with its literary and intellectual issues, is probably more comprehensive than any other nineteenth-century southern author. Simms s career began with a short novel, Martin Faber, published in 1833. This Gothic tale is reminiscent of James Hogg s Confessions of a Sinner and was written four years before Edgar Allan Poe s William Wilson. Narrated in the first person, it is considered a pioneering examination of criminal psychology. Martin seduces...

In partnership with the University of South Carolina Press, the Simms Initiatives at the University of South Carolina Libraries reissue authoritative editions of out of print works by William Gilmore Simms, antebellum South Carolina's preeminent man of letters. Full content from these volumes will also be available online via www.sc.edu/library. As part of the inaugural effort, the six volumes of The Letters of William Gilmore Simms-first published by USC Press between 1952 and 1982-are also being reissued in their first paperback editions. Each volume also includes a new scholarly...