SOURCE: “Paddy McGann, William Gilmore Simm's Devil Story,” in Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Vol. 69, No. 3, March, 1965, pp. 197-204.

In the following essay, Bush explicates Paddy McGann, a picaresque dialect novel that features a comical and symbolic representation of the Devil.

William Gilmore Simms's most notable wartime publication, Paddy McGann; or, The Demon of the Stump, was published in 1863 in a Richmond weekly, The Southern Illustrated News. The novel has never been published in book form, probably because of the element of Southern patriotism that Simms included in it. There is elation over the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg and contempt for the character of Northern people and institutions. Simms's biographer, William Peterfield Trent, believed the work would never be resurrected, but Trent's slight references to the novel suggest that he may have known only the beginning of it. At any rate it is forgotten, a fate...