Martin Faber: The Story of a Criminal with "Confessions of a Murder"

Preface to the Arkansas Edition

PREFACE TO THE ARKANSAS EDITION* William Gilmore Simms needs to be read to be appreciated, and he can be neither read nor appreciated unless his works are made available. Thus I am pleased to edit for the University of Arkansas Press the Selected Fiction of William Gilmore Simms: Arkansas Edition, beginning with Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia. Selected Fiction will include novels originally designated by Simms as Border Romances, selected novels from his Revolutionary War Series, his three novels dealing with pre-colonial and colonial warfare with Native Americans, and several volumes of his best shorter fiction, including The Wigwam and the Cabin. In these volumes, Simms depicts the American frontier from pre-colonial times in sixteenth-century Florida in its ever westward movement across the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River Valley in the early nineteenth century. Though the Arkansas Edition of Simms will not be a critical edition in the strictest sense, the principles in establishing copy-text are those recommended by the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. For each volume copy-text has been selected under the following procedures: (1) if the author issued a revised edition, such edition becomes copy-text; (2) if there was no revised edition, the original publication is the copy-text; (3) if a critical text (established under CEAA or other comparable standards) exists, such text is the copy-text. In each volume of Selected Fiction there will be explanatory as well as textual notes, with a list of the more significant substantive revisions made by the author in preparing the text for a revised edition. Simms’s nineteenth-century spelling remains unmodernized; all emendations in the text of typographical errors, redundancies, or omissions are recorded. Each volume will contain both an introduction and an afterword. I am indebted to the University of Arkansas Press for permission to * The preface to the Arkansas Edition and the William Gilmore Simms chronology were originally published in William Gilmore Simms, Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia, ed. John Caldwell Guilds (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993). Simms-MFaber final pages:Layout 1 4/10/08 11:50 AM Page xi incorporate relevant portions of my Simms: A Literary Life for the introductions; the afterwords analyze the works by Simms in more detail and depth than was possible in the limited scope of a biography. —JCG xii PREFACE TO THE ARKANSAS EDITION Simms-MFaber final pages:Layout 1 4/10/08 11:50 AM Page xii ...