Welcome

"Who, twenty years ago, of all the merely practical world, believed that a whisper could be conveyed from New York to New Orleans, in the space of three minutes, and on the wings of lightening. . . . It is now nearly twenty years, my friends, since I had the pleasure of making a visit to the studio of Professor Morse, under the guidance of a distinguished literary friend. Nobody then suspected his silent purpose of yoking electricity to the car of time."
--William Gilmore Simms

Welcome to the William Gilmore Simms Society's (WGSS) blog. The WGSS is the professional association for students of William Gilmore Simms (1806 - 1870). Simms's work as a poet, novelist, and historian place him in the first rank of nineteenth-century American men of letters.

We are, of course, aware of the irony of our endeavor---a blog devoted to a critic of excessive materialism and the cult of progress. Nevertheless, we hope to facilitate the study of Simms by using this site for posting news, research notes, notices of new books, and anything else that might be of interest to the community of Simms scholars.

More information on the WGSS can be found on our official website:
http://www.westga.edu/~simms/

Thanks for doing this, Sean ... onward into the cybermurk!