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William Gilmore Simms

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@ National Portrait Gallery

Unidentified Artist

Description

Born Charleston, South CarolinaThe writer and editor William Gilmore Simms illuminated the history of the American South. Specifically, his novels and substantial body of verse framed and animated white Southern history, identity, and experience, conveying a love of the landscape and reinforcing class hierarchies.Like Washington Irving, Simms periodically inserted the first person into his historical storytelling in order to create immediacy and excitement. An enslaver, he consciously defended Southern civilization—including the institution of slavery—as patriotic, chivalric, and even humane, especially in contrast to the capitalism of the North. Simms was deeply respected by his peers. In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe praised him as “the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, ever produced.” By the end of the Civil War, however, Simms’s attacks on the antislavery movement and his support for the Confederacy caused him to lose favor among critics.Frances Carroll Simms, Asheville, N.C.; gift 1995 NPG
Type:
Image
Format:
Oil On Canvas
Rights:
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; donated in memory of the Charles Carroll Simms family
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Record Contributed By

National Portrait Gallery

Record Harvested From

Smithsonian Institution