The Training of an American: The Earlier Life & Letters of Walter H. Page - Winner, Biography, 1929

The Training of an American: The Earlier Life & Letters of Walter H. Page

By: Burton J. Hendrick

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928

The Training of an American: The Earlier Life & Letters of Walter H. Page is, interestingly, not the first Pulitzer for Burton J. Hendrick, and, on top of that, it is not the first Pulitzer about Walter H. Page for Hendrick. Hendrick's The Life & Letters of Walter H. Page, focusing on Page's later years as American ambassador to Great Britain, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1923. Page, whose name doesn't often appear in our modern studies of American history (at least as far as I remember), must have been a greatly admired figure in the 1920s.

Hendrick's 1929 winner focuses on the earlier life of Page. He was not a politician - he was a journalist who spent most of his life prior to ambassadorship seeking educational reform, especially in the post-Civil War South. North Carolina-born Page felt a heavy burden for the return of the South to it's true glory days before the rise of the plantation owner and a lazy society - the South that produced George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

I truly enjoyed reading this book. Aside from a few overly long quoted passages, Hendrick tells the story of Page's life instead of just presenting a chronological account of fact. The book also gives important glimpses into the struggles created by Reconstruction in the South.