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, ...

           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 ...