formal opposition, they had the fieldnpretty much to themselves except fornsporadic populist rumblings from thenMidwest.nAnyone who will look at what passednfor mainstream literary history and criticismnin the late 19th and early 20thncenturies, for instance, will find a hostnof second- and third-rate New Englandnwriters (Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier,nBancroft, Motley, and many othersnnow justly forgotten) shamelessly celebratednas the perihelion of Americannletters, with only an occasional slightingnreference to Poe or Melville.nWhen Hawthorne appears it is in anninterpretation sanitized to please NewnEngland schoolmarms of both sexes. Itnis littie known but true, that the presentnstature of Poe arid Melville and understandingnof Hawthorne (all of whomnwere outside the New England canon)nrests upon the heroic efforts of a fewnscholars and critics in this century toncorrect, in part, the incredibly meanspiritednand petty Bostonian warp thatnwas imposed on the evaluation ofnAmerican literature after the CivilnWar.nIt is also a fact that the success of thenBostonians in literary reputation wasnnot matched by the quality of theirncontributions as measured in the perspectivenof the ages. American creativenliterature of the first rank was madenalmost entirely outside of the Boston-nCambridge ethos. Poe was a selfdeclarednSoutherner in perpetual combatnall of his short career with the NewnEngland spirit; Melville a New YorknDemocrat who could write verse inncelebration of the ancient honor ofnVirginia in the midst of the Civil Warnand whose obsessed Captain Ahab wasnpossibly (possibly) a metaphorical abolitionist.nHawthorne was a friend ofnFranklin Pierce, the most Southern ofnall Northeastern politicians, and thenmain thrust of his work is a subversionnof the self-congratulatory millennialismnof his New England brethren. (Indo not count Emerson and Thoreau innthe first rank. Even those who admirenthem must admit that they are wouldbenphilosophers and saints, not strictlyncreative artists.)nAfter Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne,nthe second rank of antebellumnliterature (omitting some interestingnone-book authors) is formed up bynCooper and Irving. Both of themn26/CHRONICLESnachieved sufficient recognition abroadneady enough that they could not benburied under Massachusetts obloquy.nBoth were at odds with the New Englandnspirit. Read Cooper on the nastynlower-class Yankees (in the originalnprecise ethnic meaning of that term)nwho swarmed into and defaced hisnancestral region in upstate New Yorkn{Homeward Bound and Home asnFound) and in opposition to abolitionistsn(The American Democrat). Andnrecollect that one of Irving’s mostnpopular stories concerns the disgrace ofnan absurd canting New Englander,nIchabod Crane, who presumed toonmuch on the good manners of thenHudson Valley Dutch.nPerhaps the most egregious remainingnuncorrected legacy of bias fromnthese old literary wars is the longcontinuednobscurity and misunderstandingnthat surrounds the Charlestonnromancer William Gilmore Simmsn(1806-1870), who just possibly, whennaccurately appreciated, will rank shouldernto shoulder with Cooper and Irving.nHe was the premier antebellumnwriter of the South, after Poe, and thenpremier interpreter of the West, aftern(or perhaps with) Cooper. One of thenmost prolific, talented, multifaceted,nand wide-ranging of American authorsnin the 19th century, Simms was recognizedneverywhere before the Civil Warn(except in the most chauvinist Bostonncircles) as a major force in the creationnof an American literature. Today he isnalmost unknown in any serious waynexcept to a few specialists.nA measure of the neglect is that thenfirst and last biography of Simms wasnpublished in 1892, and that a superficialnand badly misconceived one. Annexcellent six-volume edition of his lettersnhas been produced in South Carolina,nbut this has been little used bynliterary scholars and even less by historians,nfew of whom have awoke to thenfact that Simms was the most articulatenintellectual in the South in the latenantebellum period and thus is, or oughtnto be, of considerable interest to generalnas well as literary history.nThere are, it is true, some formidablenobstacles to an appreciation ofnSimms. One of the contributors ton”Long Years of Neglect,” James E.nKibler Jr. (with an essay on Simms’snpoetry), has said elsewhere that Simmsnnnmust have written steadily with bothnhands all his life. He published aboutn70 or so separate tides — poetry, plays,nnovels, short stories, history, essays —nand probably an equal amount of material,noften anonymous or pseudonymous,nin the numerous Southern journalsnof which he served as editor andnchief contributor. (In his spare time,nSimms was a planter, a public man,nand the chief literary talent scout andncritic of the South.)nNot only is the volume and diversitynof his work so daunting as to encouragenmost scholars to pass him by, but muchnof the vast output is hard to find. ThenCassique of Kiawah, possibly Simms’snbest novel, is virtually unobtainable.nWoodcraft, the other possible best, is anlitrie more available, having been reprintednin South Carolina in an annotatednedition along with Simms’s othernRevolutionary War novels during thenAmerican Revolution bicentennial. Byna strange fate, Simms’s best known andnmost available novel, The Yemassee,nthe one which most people are likely tonhave read if they have read anything, isnfar from his best.nAdded to these logistical obstaclesnare the ideological problems. As annunapologetic and explicit defender ofnthe regime of the Old South, Simms isna highly unsympathetic and nearly incomprehensiblenfigure for most modernnscholars. Even so, the main reasonnthat Simms’s writings are relativelynunknown and undervalued is scholarlyninertia — the tendency to repeat oldnerrors generation after generation rathernthan do the hard work of realnexploration and reassessment.nIn fact, in the past half century or so,nthere has been a very large accumulationnof specialized scholarship onnSimms, in books, articles, and theses,nexploring specific aspects of his oeuvresnand life. The net result has been angradually rising estimate of his literarynstanding. This considerable literaturenhas never been formulated in a waynthat has had much impact on generalnhistory; however, the present volumenof essays does not come out of thenblue, but is an expression of a longgatheringnmovement. In the book are anI dozen essays by both literary scholarsnand historians on Simms’s major worksnand aspects of his career. It remains tonbe seen whether the insights and judgmentsnpresented here will be integrat-n