 | |  |
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.
| | |