“The true scholar is not content to discover the truth—he must make it known.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882).
American essayist, lecturer, and philosopher, Emerson was a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement and a passionate advocate for intellectual courage, moral inquiry, and the public responsibility of the scholar.

It began with a clue. A slip of language. A name too neatly tucked into silence.

For 272 years, The Humourist remained one of colonial America’s most tantalizing mysteries: a razor-sharp voice that burst onto the front page of The South-Carolina Gazette in 1753–54—and then vanished.

No signature. No farewell. Just a string of dazzling essays and a question no one could quite answer: Who was he?

What followed, for me, was part scholarship, part literary detective work. I traced language. Scoured wills, shipping records, footnotes, marginalia. I followed the trail from Charleston to Edinburgh and back again.

And finally, the mask slipped: Alexander Gordon—Scottish-born, Enlightenment-educated, early Egyptologist, and Clerk of His Majesty’s Council in South Carolina. A man fluent in satire, fearless with a quill, and brilliant enough to set colonial Charleston ablaze with wit.

And now?

For the first time ever, Gordon’s essays will appear in book form—annotated, introduced, and taking their rightful place in the American literary tradition.

This Friday, the printed proof arrives: Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charles, South Carolina.

It’s the end of a search. It’s the beginning of a reckoning. It heralds the long-overdue restoration of a brilliant, fearless pen.

It’s a resurrection.