William Gilmore Simms

William Gilmore Simms, born in 1806, was a writer in the Antebellum South. His literary career began in 1825 at age 19 as an editor on The Album, a Charleston literary journal. He later wrote for The Tablet and The Southern Literary Gazette and edited the proslavery Southern Quarterly Review, which gave voice to sectional issues. Simms works include novels, poems, plays, essays, criticism, history, and geography. His major subjects were the American Revolution and frontier life. Among his most famous books were Guy Rivers (1834) and Beauchampe: or, The Kentucky Tragedy (1842). He died in 1870.