Unquestionably the author with the best claim to being the Honoré de Balzac of American literature, William Gilmore Simms was in fact more prolific and wide-ranging than the great Frenchman himself. The page count of work published in book form alone runs to an amazing twenty-five thousand. If uncollected stories, poems, essays, and reviews were added, this figure would be increased by half. What wonder that at his death in 1870, his fingers could not be straightened from the position of holding the pen. No author has written so widely in so many different genres. The fact that he did so with skill and competence makes his achievement all the more impressive. He wrote 24 novels; 110 short stories; 2,000 poems (lyric, dramatic, and narrative, some of them book-length, and only half appearing in collections, the other 1,000 scattered through scores of nineteenth-century periodicals); several plays; scores of essays; 4 biographies; a significant...