The Southerner
A Novel
Walter Hines Page
New Introduction by Scott Romine
Presaging William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, the protagonist of Walter Hines
Page’s The Southerner perpetually lurches toward progressive ideals while bearing the
unshakable weight of the past in the post–Civil War South. The novel is the fictional
autobiography of Nicholas Worth, a Harvard-educated southerner who unsuccessfully
champions public education reform in his native state. Worth recounts his struggles to
move between the Old South and the New and gives readers a sustained critique of an
era in which that kind of movement seemed impossible.
First published serially in the Atlantic Monthly 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 the mythos of a bygone era. Through Worth, Page voices hopeful opinions on the social and economic reconciliation of the North and South and of the black
and white populations of the South while never losing sight of the stumbling blocks
obstructing the path toward progress—particularly the shortcomings of the educational system, 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 postwar 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, which places the book in its cultural context and examines the work’s literary
reception.
Walter Hines Page (1855–1918) was a
journalist, publisher, and U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom during
World War I.
Scott Romine is an associate professor
of English at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro and the author
of The Narrative Forms of Southern Community.
Southern Classics
Mark M. Smith and Peggy G. Hargis,
series editors
March 2008, 464 pages
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