Cassique of Kiawah: A Colonial Romance

by William Gilmore Simms

Originally published in 1859, The Cassique of Kiawah is the history of how, from humble origins, a little settlement planted between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers began to grow into what would become a proud and prosperous civilization. In this historical romance, William Gilmore Simms, one of nineteenth-century America's greatest novelists and historians, uses extensive research and eloquent detail to achieve a perfect balance of history and fiction.
In 1684, when Carolina was still a new colony, the city of Charleston lacked civilization--no churches, no marketplaces, no religion or trade. A group of settlers (known then as blackguards or ruffians, and among them Harry Calvert, privateer and proud hero of our tale) struggled to build and protect a civilization, a community that would grow to become one of the most loved in the South.
Scarcely available since its publication before the Civil War, The Cassique of Kiawah has been touted as "a lost masterpiece," and "one of the great works of American literature." Another critic described the novel as "a delightful novel of manners, and a realistic depiction of the early evolution of a society."

Paperback

First published January 1, 1859

About the author

William Gilmore Simms (April 17, 1806 – June 11, 1870) was a poet, novelist and historian from the American South whose novels achieved great prominence during the 19th century, with Edgar Allan Poe pronouncing him the best novelist America had ever produced. In recent decades, though, Simms' novels have fallen out of favor, although he is still known among literary scholars as a major force in antebellum Southern literature. He is also remembered for his strong support of slavery and for his opposition to Uncle Tom's Cabin, in response to which he wrote reviews and a novel.

Reviews

[John Parr · Rating 4 out of 5]

The recent media drama over the movie adaptation of Ender's Game coming out and the people who were boycotting it because Orson Scott Card is a homophobe stirred my memory of reading this book. It has been over 25 years since I read it, and I remember very little detail except my reaction to reading it and how wrong I was about the author and the book.

I was in a Southern Literature class, and the professor was a William Gilmore Simms scholar. Like all undergrads, I had an opinion as to what good literature was and no one was going to tell me otherwise, least of all a professor who was a scholar of some old racist white dude who strongly supported slavery from the mid-19th century.

I dreaded reading it for weeks. Everything about it turned me off. It was huge, 1100 pages. Our copy was a small press reprint of a book that had been out of print for almost a century. I thought that was a major clue. The title was horrible. What the hell was a "Cassique," anyway? It came out in 1859. What little I had read from that era I couldn't stand.

However, I at least can say that I read the books that I was assigned. I left my backpack in my car and took only the book, and went to the student center a little before noon on the Sunday before the Monday deadline by which we were supposed to have completely read the book.

I cracked it open and started to read. I remember thinking it wasn't nearly as dry as I imagined it would be. While the text wasn't completely bereft of archaic 19th century words, it wasn't packed with them either. Pages were turning, and before I knew it I was actually pulled in. Against all my expectations, I was actually enjoying it.
To my surprise, I kept turning pages until I was done, roughly 12 hours later.

It's not a book I would recommend today. While my tastes are not extremely sophisticated, there are hundreds of books I would read before I picked this one up again.

If you're a scholar of southern literature, you eventually come across Simms, but there's no other real reason to pick it up. It is a book that belongs in its time and place.

The point of my review of this book is that THIS is the book where I truly learned the lesson of "don't judge a book by its cover"(or its author).

[Jon Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very entertaining. An epic. Should be made into a mini series.

[Caroline Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like Faulkner, try Simms