Carl Werner was published in December 1838 by George Adlard of New York.[1]  In the author’s advertisement, Simms classified the collected stories as “moral imaginative” tales, a form of allegory illuminating the “strifes between the rival moral principles of good and evil.”  Such stories, according to John C. Guilds, may often exploit supernatural elements, although it is not necessary.  Simms attributed the origin of the title story to “an ancient monkish legend,” as he set “Carl Werner” in the deepest parts of the German forest where the narrator and his friend ...

           One of the most important works in Simms’s development as a writer, Martin Faber has a long and intriguing publication history.  Originally published as a novella by J. & J. Harper of New York in 1833, it was revised and expanded for re-publication, alongside nine other short stories and a poem, as Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal, and Other Tales, issued by Harper & Brothers in 1837.[1]  Simms biographer John Caldwell Guilds notes the significance of Martin Faber for the author, as its writing and Simms’s hopes for it, seemed to seriously alter his life in his late ...

           Stories and Tales is Volume V of the University of South Carolina’s Centennial Edition of the writings of William Gilmore Simms[1].  This volume contains fifteen stories and tales, chronologically presented, collecting writings from all phases of Simms’s career. [2]  Simms wrote short fiction, often of wildly inconsistent quality, throughout his long career; his best fiction was praised by Poe, while his poorer fiction was often self-consciously born out of economic necessity[3].  Simms published his short fiction widely both in a variety of periodicals and multiple book-length ...

         While one of the more obscure works in Simms’s canon, The Prima Donna:  A Passage from City Life, provides an intriguing look into his relationship with the serial publishers who published so much of his work.  It is also a noteworthy work for its content.  Biographer John C. Guilds finds that it  reflects Simms’s “interest in theater” and helps to demonstrate that the author “wrote more effectively about drama than he wrote drama itself.”[1] A brief, 24-page fiction published as a standalone book by Louis A. Godey in 1844, The Prima Donna was originally composed sometime ...

                Originally published by Wiley and Putnam in two volumes—the first series in October 1845 and the second in February 1846—for the Library of American Books series, The Wigwam and the Cabin is a collection of border stories about the southwestern frontier.  Simms best summarized the collection in a dedicatory letter to his father-in-law for the 1856 Redfield edition: “One word for the material of these legends.  It is local, sectional—and to be national in literature, one must needs be sectional.  No one mind can fully or fairly illustrate the characteristics of any great ...