When Horace E.Scudder, in 1898, resigned the editorship of the _Atlantic Monthly_, Page succeeded him.
Thus Page became the successor of James Russell Lowell, James T.Fields, William D.Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich as the head of this famous periodical.

This meant that he had reached the top of his profession.

He was now forty-three years old.
No American publication had ever had so brilliant a history.

Founded in 1857, in the most flourishing period of the New England writers, its pages had first published many of the best essays of Emerson, the second series of the Biglow papers as well as many other of Lowell's writings, poems of Longfellow and Whittier, such great successes as Holmes's "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," Mrs.Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and the early novels of Henry James.

If America had a literature, the _Atlantic_ was certainly its most successful periodical exponent.