This is a fictious rendering of the uphill battles of a progressive southerner advocating open education.Presaging Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, the protagonist of Page’s
The Southerner
perpetually lurches toward progressive ideals while bearing the unshakeable weight of the past in the post-Civil War South. The novel is the fictional autobiography of Nicholas Worth, a Harvard-educated southern who unsuccessfully champions open education in his native state. First published serially in
The Atlantic
in 1906 and subsequently in book form by Doubleday, Page, and Company in 1909,
The Southerner
espouses a distinctive southern sensibility that pits an ennobling sense of social obligation against a culture misguided by mythos of a bygone era. Through Worth, Page voices hopeful opinions on social and economic reconciliation while never losing sight of the stumbling blocks marring the path toward progress - particularly the obstacle of education, but also those of party politics, the press, the church, and institutions invested in lionizing the Confederacy.Valuable for its historical perspectives on conflicting attitudes of racial and regional differences in the post - war years,
The Southerner
also warrants reading for its high literary merits. As editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
during the 1890s and co-owner of Doubleday, Page, and Company, Page was deeply immersed in the best literary endeavors of his day. His writing shows the influence of the realism employed by Ellen Glasgow and Theodore Dreiser as well as the thoughtful engagements with race seen in the works of Charles Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois.
The Southern Classics
edition of the novel includes a new introduction by Scott Romine that places the book in its cultural context and examines the work’s literary reception.