In the closing years of his life, William Gilmore Simms found himself physically unwell, near-indigent, and living in a post-Civil War world that challenged his entire conception of social order.  Yet, out of this, Simms produced one last great flourish of creativity, including The Cub of the Panther:  A Hunter Legend of the “Old North State.”  This novel shares certain features with the author’s earlier border romances, exhibiting a similar interest in violence, comedy, and social stratification.  Yet, the different socio-political circumstances of the postbellum world ...

            In his lifetime, William Gilmore Simms “was the author of thirty-four works of fiction, nineteen volumes of poetry, three of drama, three anthologies, three volumes of history, two of geography, six of biography, and twelve of reviews, miscellanies and addresses, a total of eighty-two volumes.”[1]  The estimate of the output was impressive, if not quite complete.[2]  Regardless, Simms’s influence was unparalleled.  No mid-nineteenth-century writer and editor did more to frame white southern self-identity and nationalism, shape southern historical consciousness, or foster ...