“What is buried is not lost. It is only waiting to be found.”

—Toni Morrison (1931–2019). American novelist and Nobel laureate, celebrated for her powerful explorations of memory, identity, and voice.

What once lived only in fragments—scattered essays, unsigned wit, a vanishing trail through the archives—now lives in print.

Today, I held the proof copy of Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina for the first time. It’s real. It’s bound. It’s been a long time coming.

For 272 years, The Humourist remained anonymous—a razor-edged satirist whose essays lit up the pages of The South-Carolina Gazette in 1753–54 and then disappeared. No signature. Just a short farewell. A voice at the power center of colonial Charleston—then gone.

What followed, for me, was part scholarship, part literary detective work. I traced language. I 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 book doesn’t just solve a mystery—it gives voice to one of colonial America’s boldest and most literate minds. His essays speak to the power of satire, the reach of the press, and the courage it takes to challenge authority with nothing but a pen and a pseudonym.

So much went into this moment: years of sleuthing, dusty archives, hunches that paid off—and many that didn’t. But now, with proof in hand, the voice that once made Charleston squirm steps forward again.

And this time?

He’s not hiding.

Stay tuned—the publication date is near, along with a few mysterious details still cloaking the official book launch.