Thomas Nelson Page, the elder son of a Virginia aristocrat living on a gracious plantation, could watch with pride as his father rode out in bright uniform and flowing cape to defend the Confederacy. Yet in later years, he would remember his father's homecoming even better than his grand departure. What was most vivid to his memory was the image of "his hand over his face, and his groan, "I never expected to come home so." "Out of such recollections, out of his sense of the discontinuity in memories of life before and after the Civil War, Page was to fashion for the South a definitive version of the dream of Arcady.

The cornerstone of Page's vision would be his dual focus of pride and loss; the strength of his fictional recreations of the Old South as Arcady would rest primarily in his ability to balance his belief in his idealizations with his awareness of threat and inevitable doom facing them. Nostalgia might win out over fatalism, yet the feeling that this golden world cast its glow from the center of impending peril is what makes its charm effective.

Growing up during the Civil War on a Virginia plantation, Page was quite naturally drawn to evaluating the quality of life before and after the war. That he would idealize the past was an inevitable consequence of the experiences which made up the most impressionable years of his life. Before the war he was the proud son of a slaveowning planter, taught by conservative parents to respect the old and suspect the new. His childhood was, by all accounts, remarkably carefree until the war intervened. He seems to have been provided with the opportunity to know all the pleasures of rural life while avoiding its hardships.