Thomas Nelson Page

Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) was born on his family's plantation in Hanover County, Virginia, studied at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University), and took a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1874. He practiced law in Richmond until 1893, by which time his story collection In Ole Virginia (1887) — narrated largely in dialect by former slaves nostalgic for the vanished antebellum South — had already made him the leading figure of the plantation-fiction school; The Burial of the Guns followed in 1894. He gave up law entirely for writing and lecturing, and later served as United States ambassador to Italy from 1913 to 1919, under Woodrow Wilson. He died in 1922.