William Gilmore Simms's unacknowledged legacy: the influence of Simms's Martin Faber on The scarlet letter and A modern instance

In 1833, the Southern author William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) published Martin Faber: The Story of a Criminal. Respectively seventeen and forty-six years following its publication, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and William Dean Howells' A Modern Instance (1879) were published. In Martin Faber, Simms set a literary precedent that would inspire specific character types and similarities of plot in both later novels.