He early became an admirer of Booker Washington, and especially approved his plan for uplifting the Negro by industrial training.

One of the great services that Page rendered literature was his persuasion of Washington to write that really great autobiography, "Up from Slavery," and another biography in a different field, for which he was responsible, was Miss Helen Keller's "Story of My Life." And only once, amid these fine but not showy activities, did Page's life assume anything in the nature of the sensational.

This was in 1909, when he published his one effort at novel writing, "The Southerner." To write novels had been an early ambition with Page; indeed his papers disclose that he had meditated several plans of this kind; but he never seriously settled himself to the task until the year 1906.

In July of that year the _Atlantic Monthly_ began publishing a serial entitled "The Autobiography of a Southerner Since the Civil War," by Nicholas Worth.

The literary matter that appeared under this title most readers accepted as veracious though anonymous autobiography.