| Backwoods
Tales
Paddy McGann, Sharp Snaffles, and Bill Bauldy
William Gilmore Simms
Introduction by Keen Butterworth
James L. W. West III, General Editor
Three gems of nineteenth-century
southern regional humor
“All students of Southern literature owe a huge debt
to Jack Guilds and the University of Arkansas Press for providing
us with the elegant and useful new editions of the work of
William Gilmore Simms.”
—Noel Polk, editor, Mississippi
Quarterly
The writings of William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) provide
a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum
South in all of its regional diversity. Simms’s account
of the region is more comprehensive than that of any other
author of his time; he treats the major intellectual and social
issues of the South and depicts the bonds and tensions among
all of its inhabitants. By the mid-1840s Simms’s novels
were so well known that Edgar Allan Poe could call him “the
best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced.”
The twelfth volume in the ongoing Arkansas Edition of the
works of William Gilmore Simms, Backwoods Tales brings
together three of the best examples of his comic writing.
All were written during the last decade of Simms’s life,
when he had become a master of his craft. These three tales
belong in the tradition of southern backwoods humor, a genre
that flourished before the Civil War and produced classic
tales by such authors as George Washington Harris, Johnson
Jones Hooper, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Paddy McGann,
“Sharp Snaffles,” and “Bill Bauldy”
are all frame tales, told by rustic narrators in authentic
dialect, with frequent pauses for libation and comment. These
three pieces of writing, never before published together,
stand among the best examples of American humor of the nineteenth
century.
Keen Butterworth,
an emeritus member of the English Department at the University
of South Carolina, has published on Simms, William Faulkner,
Robert Penn Warren, and other southern writers. He has recently
written about Louis Armstrong for the Southern Review
and is currently pursuing projects in fiction and poetry.
James L. W. West III
is general editor and John Caldwell Guilds is general editor
emeritus of the Arkansas Edition of Simms’s works.
May
6 x 9, 398 pages
$39.95 (s) paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-922-3
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