Eutaw: A Sequel to The Forayers, or The Raid of the Dog Days

by William Gilmore Simms, David W. Newton (Editor)

William Gilmore Simms’s (1806–1870) body of work, which provides a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all its regional diversity, complete with its literary and intellectual issues, is probably more comprehensive than that of any other nineteenth-century southern author. By the mid–1840s his novels were so famous that Edgar Allan Poe wrote that Simms was “the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced.” Simms wrote eight novels that were set in his home state of South Carolina during the Revolutionary War, and Eutaw, the sixth, was published in 1856, the same year Simms had a disastrous lecture tour in the North, in which he voiced strong pro–South Carolina and pro-Southern views.

Eutaw was a sequel to his very successful 1855 novel, The Forayers , and thus completed the most comprehensive saga of the war in our literary history. It focuses on the battle of Eutaw Springs in 1781, which ended British domination of South Carolina. Prominent in this significant battle were Nathanael Greene, Light-Horse Harry Lee, and Francis Marion, about whom Simms would later write a biography. As with other volumes in the Arkansas Edition of Simms’s work, this volume includes a critical introduction by the editor and a Simms chronology, as well as appendices dealing with textual matters.

588 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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.