After Poe, Simms was the most important literary figure of the antebellum South. Although he lacked Poe's genius, he was nevertheless a professional writer who took his craft seriously. His output was prodigious: he attempted nearly all fields of writing--fiction, poetry, drama, criticism, history, biography, journalism--and his literary reputation was high during the years before the Civil War, in both the South and the North. More than any other writer, including Poe, Simms was the central figure of Southern letters. If Poe's Southernness was implicit, Simms's was explicit. His subject matter, his themes, his point of view were predominantly and particularly Southern. Furthermore he knew nearly all the important Southern writers of his day and encouraged them to advance the cause of sectional and national literature. He also helped them by publishing their work in the various periodicals he edited. Before 1850, Simms acted as a literary emissary to...