William Gilmore Simms, novelist, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, April 17, 1806, the son of William Gilmore Simms and his first wife Harriet Ann Singleton. After his mother's death in 1808 he was raised by his maternal grandmother while his father went to the frontier of Tennessee. He was admitted to the bar but never practiced, In 1826 he was married to Anna Malcolm Giles and turned to newspaper work, and was part owner and editor of the City Gazette. On the death of his wife in 1832 he went to New York and there published his first novel, "Martin Faber," although he had previously published several volumes of poems. He returned to South Carolina in 1835, where he married Chevillette Roach the next year and went to live on her estate in the southern part of the state. He served in the State Legislature from 1844 to 1846. His wife died in 1863, and later the Northern armies burned his home. He died June 11, 1870.

REFERENCES: W. P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms; Book News (Philadelphia), June, 1912; an etching of the young Simms in Appleton's Cyc. Amer. Biog., V, 533, and a small half-tone of him in his later years in Kunitz and Haycraft, Amer. Authors, 693.

Irwin's American Novels. No. 28