William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870)

Excellent collection of stories by a forgotten antebellum Southern regionalist whose frontier humor looks forward toward Mark Twain. My one quarrel is that the editor fails to provides dates for the individual stories, which would have been useful as an addition to her (relatively short at sixteen pages) introduction.

Simms was a slave-owning South Carolinian and staunch secessionist and as a result his work (which included a novel rebutting Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin) fell down "memory hole" after the Civil War.… (mais)

First e-book read, downloaded free from Googlebooks. Originally published in 1835 this inspired romance, set in South Carolina during the conflict for American independence was widely read in antebellum years and has many qualities which make its popularity understandable: lots of vivid action, superbly wrought scenes of conflict, effective melodrama, noble characters, nefarious characters, comic characters and many insightful and uplifting authorial observations. Simms possessed immense patriotism and talent and does not deserve to be ignored just because he was on the losing side of the Civil War. The version I read is full of typographical errors but I discovered that the first 20 chapters have been posted on Wikipedia and seem to be error free.… (mais)

This is a masterpiece! The first full-length book I've read entirely on a computer screen (downloaded from The Gutenberg Project) is a 'remake' of Othello set in antebellum South Carolina and Alabama. It made me laugh out loud with one elaborately prepared witticism which reminded me of a similar triumph in Henry James' The Tragic Muse - and there is plenty of other comic relief - but, it is, of course, a terrible and very moving tragedy of human pride, misunderstanding and weakness. My eyes are still wet from the inspired ending of this splendid novel.… (mais)