num_pages: 880
description: This is the ﬁrst volume in The Centennial Edition of the Writings of William Gilmore Simms. 'Voltmeier' has never appeared in book form. Written in 1868, it was published in twenty-six weekly installments in 1869. Set in “the border range between South and North Carolina” in the early years of the nineteenth century, the novel gives Simms a chance to depict the ordinary lite of a half-savage America, and he does so with the grim, realistic humor that remains his most obviously attractive quality to a modern reader, But the central character, Leonard Voltmeier, is a complex and enigmatic ﬁgure, such as Herman Melville might have created. A German intellectual, he masterminds a gang of outlaws while living the lite of a cultured Southern landowner. The conﬂict between his criminal and Jeffersonian life, never reconciled, eventually brings about his death. The creator of this sinister parable, the most prolific and popular writer of his time, was born in 1806 in Charleston, South Carolina. He died in 1870, ruined by the civil war.
language: English
title: The Writings of William Gilmore Simms: Stories and Tales
titlecomplete: The Writings of William Gilmore Simms: Stories and Tales (Centennial Edition of the Writings of William Gilmore Simms, 5)
publisher: University of South Carolina Press