SOURCE: "Magazine Editors and the Stories of Thomas Nelson Page's Late Flowering," in Essays Mostly on Periodical Publishing in America, Duke University Press, 1973, pp. 148-61.

Holman focuses on the non-Southern stories collected in Under the Crust, which found inhospitable magazine editors because they did not conform to Page's earlier local color stories of Southern chivalry.

Like his enemies, the stories a writer has trouble selling are one measure of the man; they also tell the reader of a later generation something of his time and place, and they make a useful gauge of his editors. The stories of Thomas Nelson Page's late flowering [published in Under the Crust (1908), included also in the collected Plantation Edition, and The Land of the Spirit (1913)] are a case in point. They consist of eleven atypical stories employing characters, settings, techniques, and themes significantly different from Page's earlier stories of planation life in...