Home > William Gilmore Simms

Simms was born at Charleston, South Carolina of Scoto-Irish descent. His mother having died during his infancy, and his father having failed in business and joined Coffees Indian fighters, young Simms was brought up by his grandmother. He was a clerk in a drug store for some years, and afterwards studied law, the bar of Charleston admitting him to practice in 1827, but he soon abandoned his profession for literature. At the age of eight he wrote verses, and in his 19th year he produced a Monody on Gen. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (Charleston, 1825). Two years later, in 1827, Lyrical and Other Poems and Early Lays appeared; and in 1828 he began journalism, editing and partly owning the City Gazette. The enterprise failed, and the editor devoted his attention entirely to letters, and in rapid succession published Tile Vision of Cones, Cain, and oilier Poems (1829), The Tricolor, or Three Days of Blood in Paris (1830), and his strongest poem, Atalantis, a story of the sea (1832). Alalantis established his fame as an author, and Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal, was warmly received.

During the American Civil War Simms espoused the side of the Secessionists in a weekly newspaper, and suffered damage at the hands of the Federal troops when they entered Charleston. He served in the state House of Representatives in 1844-1846, and the University of Alabama conferred on him the degree of LL.D. He died at Charleston in 1870.

From the 1911 Britannica. Desperately needs updating and copyediting. See also the .