Richard Harding Davis(1864-1916)

American journalist, novelist and playwright Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1864 (literary talent ran in his family: his father was a newspaper editor and his mother was a writer). He attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, and in 1886 he began his literary career as a journalist on the "Philadelphia Record" newspaper. Three years later he went over to "The New York Sun". The next year he was hired as managing editor of "Harper's Weekly" magazine, and in that capacity traveled all over the US, Central America and the Mediterranean. He showed a facility for war coverage, reporting on the Greco-Turkish War, the Boer War in South Africa, the Cuban front of the Spanish-American War and World War I. His coverage of the German invasion of Belgium in that war brought his name to the international forefront, and was considered by many to be the quintessential example of war correspondence.

His first effort as a fiction writer, "Gallagher", was published in "Scribner's" magazine in 1890 and began his long and successful career as a writer and novelist. His second wife was stage actress Bessie McCoy, whom he married in 1912 (his first marriage lasted from 1899 to 1910), and Davis began yet a third successful career as a playwright (he wrote 25 plays altogether) and became a celebrated member of the New York City "social set". Many of his novels and plays have been made into successful films.

He died of heart disease in 1916 at his home in Mt. Kisco, NY.