SOURCE: "Corra Harris on the Declining Influence of Thomas Nelson Page," in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, Fall, 1975, pp. 505-09.

Simms quotes at length an astute critic who recognized and identified the causes of Page's declining popularity and influence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922) was the chief spokesman of the plantation literary tradition. Achieving fame as a local-color writer of the New South, he depicted life in the Tidewater region of the Old Dominion both before and after the Civil War. Most of his essays, stories, and novels celebrate the chivalric ways of pre-Civil War Virginians and lament the passing of the antebellum order.

In a time when critical standards were not particularly high, Page enjoyed favorable criticism of even his poorer stories of the 1890s. His work also appealed to the popular reader of the day. According to Rosewell Page, Red...