Thomas Nelson Page

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Thomas Nelson Page (b. Hanover County, Virginia, April 23, 1853-d. Hanover County, Virginia, 1 November 1922) was an American writer.

Page popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing. His 1887 collection of short stories, In Ole Virginia, is the quintessential work of that genre. Another short-story collection of his is entitled The Burial of the Guns (1894).

He was married to Anne Seddon Bruce on July 28, 1886. She died on December 21, 1888 of a throat hemorrhage. Page then wed Florence Lathrop Field, a widowed sister-in-law of retailer Marshall Field, on June 6, 1893, remaining with her until his death.

A scion of the prominent Nelson and Page families, he attended Washington College and the University of Virginia in pursuit of a legal career and was a lawyer in Richmond between 1876 and 1893, when he moved to Washington. Here he kept up his writing, which amounted to eighteen volumes when they were compiled and published in 1912. Under Woodrow Wilson, Page served as U.S. ambassador to Italy for six years between 1913 and 1919. His book entitled Italy and the World War (1920) is a memoir of his service there.