Walter Hines Page

Biography

He then began a journalistic career editing the St. Joseph Gazette. After two years at the Gazette, in 1881 he resigned to travel through the South, having arranged to contribute letters on southern sociological conditions to the New York World, the Springfield Republican and the Boston Post. These letters were helpful in educating the North and the South to a fuller understanding of their mutual dependence. In 1882, he joined the editorial staff of the New York World and wrote a series of articles on Mormonism, the result of personal investigation in Utah. It became one of the great book publishing companies of the 20th century. In 1986, it was acquired by Bertelsmann AG. The company sometimes publishes under the name "Country Life Press" in Garden City, New York, where Page resided in the years prior to World War I. Among the great writers in the early days of Doubleday was Rudyard Kipling.

Page believed that a free and open education was fundamental to democracy. In 1902, he published The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths (New York: Doubleday, Page). He felt that nothing—class, economic means, race, religion—should be a barrier to education.

In March 1913, Page was appointed as ambassador to Britain by President Woodrow Wilson. He is buried in Old Bethesda Cemetery in Aberdeen, North Carolina. A memorial plaque in his honor rests in Westminster Abbey in Westminster, London, UK.

Walter Hines Page was also the brother of Robert N. Page, a U.S. Representative from North Carolina, and Henry A. Page, a North Carolina representative and a founder of the North Carolina Highway System.

The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, by Burton J. Hendrick, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1923, and The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, by Burton J. Hendrick, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1929.

There is a Walter Hines Page Senior High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature (currently Ariel Dorfman) at Duke University.

Today, scholarships are awarded by the English-Speaking Union (ESU), in Walter Hines Pages' name to teachers from the United Kingdom to study in the United States and Canada.

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