As Good as a Comedy and Paddy McGann are two short novels that reveal Simms’s talents as a comedic writer.  While other works, like Border Beagles, contain humorous sections or characters, these two works stand out as sustained comedic successes.  In these, Simms shows an understanding of and skill at utilizing the tropes of frontier humor, popularized by the likes of A.B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, as well as a use of humor as social commentary that foreshadowed the work of Twain.  While each was published previously, they were published together in one volume in 1972, ...

           One of the more important, though most-lightly studied, of Simms’s works is Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia, SC, a narrative recounting of William Tecumseh Sherman’s entry into and occupation of South Carolina’s capital city, and its subsequent destruction in the waning days of the Civil War.  Simms originally published Sack and Destruction serially in The Columbia Phoenix, “a small newspaper edited by Simms that commenced publication in the waning weeks of the Confederacy” from the newspaper’s first edition until 10 April 1865; after the close of the War, ...

            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 ...