SOURCE: "Thomas Nelson Page," in Commemorative Tributes of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1905-1941, Spiral Press, 1942, pp. 134-38.

Johnson, one of Page's editors at The Century Magazine, defines Page's contribution to American literature.

One day in 1881 there came to the editorial office of Scribner's Monthly, afterward the Century Magazine, the manuscript of a story destined to be of large significance in American fiction. It was a tale of Virginia during the Civil War and was entitled "Marse Chan," and it was signed by a name not known to the editorial staff, that of Thomas Nelson Page. The editor-in-chief, Richard Watson Gilder, being then in Europe, as a matter of routine it was first submitted to the "reader," Mrs. Sophie Bledsoe Herrick, who (so to speak) "discovered" it and passed it on to the present writer with a warm recommendation that it be accepted. It proved to...