Thomas Nelson Page's importance to southern literature results from his nostalgic short stories that articulate and popularize the myth of the South's Edenic origins, its prelapsarian heroes and heroines, and its fall. A self-proclaimed Homer, Page created panegyrics that look back upon a civilization which Page called in his history, The Old South (1892), "a civilization so pure, so noble, that the world to-day holds nothing equal to it." Page's plantation settings and characters became the popular images of the antebellum South; of the southern belle, for example, he writes, "She was a creature of peach-blossom and snow; languid, delicate, saucy.... She was not versed in the ways of the world, but she had no need to be; she was better than that; she was well bred."

As a local colorist, Page gives his characters the dialect and customs of the region and paints settings of sparkling plantations and...