FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — William Gilmore Simms’s 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 (1806-1870) was “the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced.”

   

Confederate Guerrilla

Eutaw

The latest novel to be released in the University of Arkansas Press’s distinguished Simms Series is Eutaw (paperback, $34.95). Published in 1856 the novel is set in Simms’s home state of South Carolina during the Revolutionary War. 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.

      The novel is edited by David W. Newton, professor of English at the University of West Georgia. James L.W. West III is the general editor of the series and John Caldwell Guilds, professor emeritus of English at the University of Arkansas, is the general editor. Neal Polk, editor of The Mississippi Quarterly, said that “all students of Southern literature owe a huge debt to Jack Guilds and the University of Arkansas Press for providing us with the elegant and useful new editions of the work of William Gilmore Simms.”

    The second book, Joseph M. Bailey’s memoir, Confederate Guerrilla (hardback, $29.95), provides a unique perspective on the fighting that took place behind Union lines in Federal-occupied northwest Arkansas during the American Civil War. Recounted by an ordinary Confederate soldier turned Southern guerrilla, Bailey’s story - now published for the first time - will appeal to modern readers’ interest in the grassroots history of the trans-Mississippi theater of the war.

     Bailey participated in such engagements as the Battle of Pea Ridge and the siege of Port Hudson and, at the Port Hudson surrender, escaped to northwest Arkansas where he fought as a guerrilla against Federal troops and civilian unionists. After Federal forces gained control of the area, Bailey rejoined the Confederate army and continued in regular service in northeast Texas until the end of the war.

        Published by the UA Press in its popular Civil War in the West series, Bailey’s story is edited by T. Lindsay Baker, holder of the W.K. Gordon Endowed Chair in Texas Industrial History and the director of the W.K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas, Tarleton State University. Series editors Donald E. Sutherland and T. Michael Parrish write in their preface to the book that “Bailey’s highly perceptive, firsthand account is a genuine historical treasure.”