Recognized today as one of Page’s most prominent works, “Marse Chan” reflects the complex ideology of life in post-Civil War America, and conveys the chivalry and romance that Page held as essential to life in the South—and which he also believed were destroyed by the aftermath of the Civil War.
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Thomas Nelson Page was an American writer and lawyer, as well as the U.S. Ambassador to Italy during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Despite his family’s wealthy lineage—both the Nelson and Page families were First Families of Virginia—Page was raised largely in poverty. Based on his own experiences living on a plantation in the Antebellum South, Page’s writing helped popularize the plantation-tradition genre, which depicted an idealized version of slavery and presented emancipation as a sign of moral decline in society. Page’s best-known works include the short story collections The Burial of the Guns and In Ole Virginia, the latter of which contains the influential story “Marse Chan.” Thomas Nelson Page died in 1922.