SOURCE: "Thomas Nelson Page," in The South in American Literature, 1607-1900, Duke University Press, 1954, pp. 795-804.

Hubbell, a pioneer and leader in Southern literature studies, describes Page's relationship with his editor and literary advisors.

More than his fellow Southerners, the Virginian is regarded as a glorifier of times past, perhaps because—as a Virginian might reply to such a charge—his state has a longer and more magnificent past to boast of. Thomas Nelson Page was among the writers of the New South the stoutest defender of the old regime. Like most of the other Virginian writers of fiction, he belonged to a family with a distinguished ancestry, and, like them, he gave his heroes and heroines a line of ancestors comparable to his own. The great days of the Nelsons and the Pages, however, had come in the last half of the eighteenth century. "Oakland" plantation in...