Excerpt from The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, Vol. 2 of 5: 1845-1849

Following the death of Dr. Alfred Taylor Odell the previous year, in 1949 we became co-editors of the letters of William Gilmore Simms. Dr. Odell, who with Mary C. Simms Oliphant, one of the present editors, originated the project in 1937, died while the first volume was in process of being made ready for publication. He thus did not live to see the fruition of his work on the project or to carry on the, editing of Simms' letters, of which all but about two hundred of some fifteen hundred included in this edition had been collected at the time of his death. We completed the first volume and saw it through the press, and have edited this volume and undertaken the editing of those to follow.

The original plan for the publication of Simms' letters provided for the inclusion of all of his personal letters which could be located by the editors, and also of the various series of public letters written by him as correspondent or editor of newspapers such as the series addressed to the City Gazette (charleston) in 1831. This plan, which was carried out in Volume I, had to be modified. So many previously unlocated personal letters were discovered through a new and extensive survey made in 1950 of college, university, public, and private libraries that there is' not sufficient space for the inclusion of the public letters in the four remaining volumes planned by the University of South Carolina Press. With regret, we have been compelled to omit them, though we have indicated their existence in footnotes and drawn upon them freely for the valuable information they supply about Simms and his times. The letters appearing in this and the following volumes are, therefore, with several obvious exceptions, Simms' personal letters, of which only a few have ever before been published.

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