University Of South Carolina Press imprint: 384 books

William Gilmore Simms was the best known and certainly the most accomplished writer of the mid-nineteenth-century South. His literary ascent began early, with his first book being published when he was nineteen years old and his reputation as a literary genius secured before he turned thirty. Over...

Born in 1928 in the small coastal town of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, Genevieve “Sister” Peterkin grew up with World War II bombing practice in her front yard, deep-sea fishing expeditions, and youthful rambles through the lowcountry. She shared her bedroom with a famous ghost and an impatient...

Bailey Martin is in perpetual motion—a child of the South Carolina lowcountry tides, being pulled to and from a reckoning with destiny. A marine biologist by training and an artist by dedication and talent, Bailey is a woman of contradictions, at once a free-spirited adventurer giving deeply of...

In Charleston Belles Abroad, Candace Bailey examines the vital role music collections played in the lives of elite women of Charleston, South Carolina, in the years leading up to the Civil War. Bailey has studied a substantial archive of music held at several southern libraries, including the library...

Three Wild Pigs: A Carolina Folktale, written and illustrated by Lisa Anne Cullen, is an adaptation of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps’s The Story of the Three Little Pigs. Set on Bird Island along the Carolina Coast, this creative retelling of the timeless tale features three generations of a...

The radical changes wrought by the rise of the salon system in nineteenth-century Europe provoked an interesting response from painters in the American South. Painterly trends emanating from Barbizon and Giverny emphasized the subtle textures of nature through warm color and broken brush stroke. Artists’...

In Working South, renowned watercolorist Mary Whyte captures in exquisite detail the essence of vanishing blue-collar professions from across ten states in the American South with sensitivity and reverence for her subjects. From the textile mill worker and tobacco farmer to the sponge diver and elevator...

In Days of Destruction, editors W. Eric Emerson and Karen Stokes chronicle the events of the siege of Charleston, South Carolina, through a collection of letters written by Augustine Thomas Smythe, a well-educated young man from a prominent Charleston family. The vivid, eloquent letters he wrote to...

Slavery remains one of the United States’ most troubling failings and its complexities have shaped American ideas about race, economics, politics, and the press since the first days of settlement. Brian Gabrial’s The Press and Slavery in America, 1791–1859 examines those intersections at times...

The essays in Creating and Contesting Carolina shed new light on how the various peoples of the Carolinas responded to the tumultuous changes shaping the geographic space that the British called Carolina during the Proprietary period (1663–1719). In doing so, the essays focus attention on some of...

Veteran journalist and southern storyteller Tom Poland has been writing about the disappearing rural South for nearly four decades. With a companionable appreciation for nostalgia, preservation, humor, and wonder, Georgialina: A Southland as We Knew It brings to life once more the fading and often-forgotten...

True Places is an emotionally charged photographic documentary of the lives of evangelical pastor Floyd Knowlin and his close-knit African American congregations who live, work, and worship in a rural stretch of coastal South Carolina. For more than a decade photographer Stanley F. Lanzano has immersed...

Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary...

"Do exploration. Do things that are new and different.” This is the philosophy that Charles H. Townes has lived by since he was a young boy growing up on a small farm in Greenville, South Carolina. While tending to chores, exploring the outdoors, and tinkering with broken tools and equipment,...