Thomas nelson page biography of donald

IN Mr. Henry James’s recently published book entitled The American Scene, the chapters on Richmond and Charleston are especially noteworthy. The restless analyst visited these cities with every desire to be romantically affected by “any small inkling (a mere specimen scrap would do) of the sense of the ‘South before the War.’” Scratching for romance throughout the country, he calculated most fondly on the vivid images, mainly beautiful and sad, which he hoped would survive in the South. He was not altogether disappointed in Charleston, to which the author of Lady Baltimore was his guide; but he found Richmond “simply blank and void” — nowhere the Southern character or the backward reference, scarcely a suggestion of the old Southern mansions with their wide verandas and the “rank sweet gardens.” Sadder still was the fact that there was no record of that life, as if legend would have nothing to say to these people. The collapse of the old order, the humiliation of defeat, the bereavement and bankruptcy involved, represented, with its obscure miseries and tragedies, a “social revolution the most unrecorded and undepicted, in proportion to its magnitude, that ever was.” Only the statue of Washington with its mid-century air, and the statue of Lee with its commmonplace surroundings, typified the high note of the old régime. The Confederate museum with its “ sorry objects ” but added to the impression of the void. An old Confederate soldier, talking volubly of the epic age; the lady who presided over the museum, — “soft-voiced, gracious, mellifluous,” — with her thoroughly “sectional” good manners; and a handsome young Virginian, “for all the world like the hero of a famous novel,” — these alone suggested “the social tone of the South that had been.”

One cannot but wish that Mr. James had been as fortunate in his Richmond guide as in his Charleston, for if “the handsome young Virginian” had been Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, the latter would have revealed to him, at

In Ole Virginia
or Marse Chan and Other Stories:
Electronic Edition.

Page, Thomas Nelson, 1853-1922

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ThomasNelsonPage

Son of John Page and Elizabeth Burwell (Nelson) Page

Brother of Frank Page, Rosewell Page and Isabella Page

[children unknown]

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Biography

Thomas Nelson Page was born in 1853, one of the Nelson family's plantations in Oakland, in Hanover, Virginia. He was the son of John Page and Elizabeth Burwell Nelson. His father was a lawyer and plantation owner. He is a descendent of the prominent Nelson and Page families, each First Families of Virginia.

The Civil War broke out when he was 8. His once-wealthy family became impoverished during Reconstruction, when he was a teenager.

He attended Washington College; however, he left due to financial reasons after 3 years. To earn money, he tutored the children of cousins in Kentucky. Then from 1873-1874 he attended the law school at the University of Virginia. He was a member of the Delta Psi fraternity.

He was admitted to the Virginia Bar Association and was practicing law in Richmond, VA, from 1876-1893. He also began a writing career during this time. Upon retiring from his law practice, he moved to Washington D.C. and also lived part time in York Harbor, Maine.

On 28 Jul 1886, in Charlotte, Virginia, he married Anne Seddon Bruce. She died just over two years later on 21 Dec 1888, from a throat hemorrhage.

He married a second time, on 6 Jun 1893, in Dupage, Illinois, to Florence Lathrop. They had no children.

He wrote 18 books by 1912. He popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing, which told of an idealized version of life before the Civil War, with contented slaves working for beloved masters and their families. His fiction writing style featured a nostalgic view of the South. He depicted enslav