The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I

Walter H. Page lived at the crossroads of America's transformation from Reconstruction to World War. Born in North Carolina in 1855, he came of age during the Civil War's aftermath, its trauma and upheaval forging the convictions that would define his career. This first volume of his life and letters traces that formation: the young Page absorbing the South's defeat and his mother's grief, the years of education and intellectual awakening, the emergence of a man who believed profoundly in democracy's promise and journalism's power to advance it. Hendrick's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography draws extensively on Page's own correspondence to create an intimate portrait of a figure who would later become America's ambassador to Britain, tasked with keeping a reluctant nation tied to the Allied cause. This is biography as intellectual history, revealing how the seeds of Page's later idealism were planted in the soil of Southern defeat and personal loss.