Richard Harding Davis
The life
Richard Harding Davis was the most famous American reporter of his generation, and he largely invented the war correspondent as a public personality. He covered six wars, from the Greco-Turkish to the First World War, and was the model for the male counterpart of the Gibson Girl, the clean-jawed American gentleman of a thousand magazine illustrations. His fiction is journalism's cousin: fast, visual, structured in scenes, written by a man who knew how a city sounds at four in the morning. Soldiers of Fortune was among the best-selling American novels of its year. He was detained by the Germans as a suspected spy in 1914, talked his way out, and filed the story.
The Lost House
56 pages — the shortest way into Davis, not the greatest.
It was a dull day at the chancellery. His Excellency the American Ambassador was absent in Scotland, unveiling a bust to Bobby Burns, paid for by the numerous lovers of that poet in Pittsburg; the First Secretary was absent at Aldershot, observing a sham battle; the Military Attache was absent at the Crystal Palace,…
