The Training of an American

Burton Hendrick returns to Walter Hines Page six years after his first Pulitzer winning volume, this time working backward to cover the decades the earlier book had left mostly unexamined, Page's North Carolina boyhood, his early struggles as a young journalist, and his rise through American magazine and newspaper publishing before the ambassadorship that made him famous. The book follows Page through editorial posts at the State Chronicle in Raleigh, the New York World and Evening Post, and the Atlantic Monthly, tracing how a Southern editor with a genuine reforming streak built the reputation and the connections that eventually put him at Doubleday, Page and Company alongside authors like Rudyard Kipling.

Hendrick again builds the narrative largely from Page's own letters, this time drawn from a period when Page was a working journalist rather than a diplomat, arguing that the conviction and editorial ambition visible in his early career explain the confident, sometimes headstrong voice that later showed up in his wartime dispatches from London. The book covers roughly the years up through 1913, when Page's appointment as ambassador to Britain opens the story the earlier volume had already told, positioning this second book as the origin story for a man whose most famous years Hendrick had already published.

Reading it means encountering an American publishing career built patiently across regional and national newspapers and magazines before it ever touched foreign policy, and it suits a reader who came to Page through the earlier wartime volume and wants to understand where his convictions actually came from. Hendrick's method stays consistent across both books, letters quoted at length over paraphrase, giving this earlier chapter of Page's life the same intimate, documentary feel as the more famous diplomatic story that follows it.