Paul Hamilton Hayne was a magazinist in the mold of Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. He spent much of his career editing magazines and contributing poems, essays, critical articles, editorials, and stories to them. As did Poe and Simms, he earned much of his livelihood from such journals, and his best work, as did theirs, usually appeared first in magazines. Much of his early reputation was based on his editorial experience with two prominent Southern journals, the Southern Literary Gazette and Russell's Magazine. After the Civil War his standing was firmly established through poems, reviews, essays, and editorial work for many Southern journals, including Southern Opinion,Southern Society, and Southern Bivouac, and through contributions, mostly of poems, to such important Northern literary monthlies as Lippincott's, Scribner's (later the Century), Harper's, and the Atlantic.

Hayne was born in 1830 in Charleston, South Carolina, to Paul Hamilton Hayne, naval...