One aspect of William Gilmore Simms's career largely overlooked is
his role as the most important magazine editor of the Old South. William
Stanley Hoole's article[1] briefly
outlines Simms's editorial career, but much material now available was
unused by Hoole. William Peterfield Trent's biography[2] gives an inadequate picture of
Simms the
editor; probably because he did not see many of them, Trent discusses
comparatively few of Simms's magazine articles. More recent studies of the
Album and Cosmopolitan reveal that even as
a
youthful editor Simms displayed the seemingly effortless versatility and
fecund but careless creativity that were to earmark his efforts as a mature
writer; already he had developed the credo for his literary career.[3] An even more important magazine
in the
biography of Gilmore Simms is sandwiched between the
Album and the Cosmopolitan: the
Southern Literary Gazette, another early Charleston periodical
(1828-1829), contains valuable revelations of his development as editor,
critic, poet, and writer of fiction. This article is an account of Simms's
editorial and authorial connections with this ambitious but ill-fated
journal.
