POPULAR AMERICAN NOVELISTS.
EDWD. BELLAMY.
F. MARION CRAWFORD. • GEO. W. CABLE. • E. P. ROE.
THOS. NELSON PAGE. • FRANK STOCKTON.
THOMAS NELSON PAGE.
AUTHOR OF “IN OLE VIRGINIA.”
N old adage declares it “an ill wind that blows nobody good;” and certainly the world may take whatever consolation it can find out of the fact that the long and bloody war between the North and South has at least afforded the opportunity for certain literary men and women to rise upon the ruins which it wrought, and win fame to themselves as well as put money in their purses by embalming in literature the story of times and social conditions that now exist only in the history of the past.
Thomas Nelson Page was born in Oakland, Hanover county, Virginia, on the twenty-third day of April, 1853, consequently, he was only eight years old when Fort Sumter was fired upon, and, during the imaginative period of the next few years, he lived in proximity to the battle fields of the most fiercely contested struggles of the war. His earliest recollections were of the happiest phases of life on the old slave plantations. That he thoroughly understands the bright side of such a life, as well as the Negro character and dialect, is abundantly established by the charming books which he has given to the world.
His childhood was passed on the estate which was a part of the original grant of his maternal ancestor, General Thomas Nelson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, for whom he was named. His early education was received in the neighborhood “subscription” schools (there were no free public schools in the South at that time), and at the hand of a gentle old aunt of whom Mr. Page tells in one of his stories. The war interfered with his regular studies but filled his mind with a knowledge schools cannot give, and, as stated above, it was out of this knowledge that his stories have grown. After the war, young Page entered the Washington and Lee University and later studied law, taking his degree in this branch from the University of Virginia, in 1874, and after graduating, practiced his profession in Richmond, Virginia, until 1884, when his first story of Virginia life “Marse Chan,” a tale of the Civil War, was printed in the “Century Magazine.” He had previously written dialectic poetry, but the above story was his first decided success, and attracted such wide attention that he forsook law for literature. In 1887, a volume of his stories was brought out under the title “In Ole Virginia,” which was followed in 1888 by “Befo’ de War; Echoes in Negro Dialect,” which was written in [♦]collaboration with Mr. A. C. Gordon. The next year a story for boys entitled, “Two Little Confederates,” appeared in the “St. Nicholas Magazine,” and was afterward published in book form. A companion volume to this is “Among the Camps or Young People’s Stories of the War.”