| Richard Harding Davis  Born: 18-Apr-1864
Birthplace: Philadelphia, PA
Died: 11-Apr-1916
Location of death: Mount Kisco, NY
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Buried, Leverington Cemetery, Roxborough, PA
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Occupation: Author, Journalist, Playwright Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Yellow-era journalist Richard Harding Davis was a novelist and the author of more than a dozen Broadway plays, but was much, much more famous as a flamoyant foreign corepondent whose reports included more than the occasional embellishments. His mother was a successful novelist, and his father was the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and had been a prominent abolitionist prior to the Civil War. As a young man Davis refused to submit to traditional hazings as a freshman at Lehigh, and instead made national headlines by telling reporters shocking tales of hazing's expectations. After the swirl of national coverage, Davis was eventually expelled for poor grades.
As a journalist, he worked for William Randolph Hearst's papers and frequently filed reports from the front wherever wars raged. He was sometimes accused of idealizing war as a "gentlemanly sport". His somewhat fictionalized account of the Rough Riders' ascent of San Juan Hill helped establish Theodore Roosevelt as an American hero. In 1914, Davis was detained in Germany as a suspected spy, but soon released. He was married to an artist Cecil Clark Davis, on the pre-marriage stipulation that they would never sleep in the same bed. After their divorce he married Broadway star Bessie McCoy.
Father: Lemuel Clarke Davis (journalist)
Mother: Rebecca Harding Davis (novelist)
Girlfriend: Ethel Barrymore (actress)
Wife: Cecil Clark Davis (artist, b. 1877, div. 1912, d. 1955)
Wife: Bessie McCoy (actress, b. circa 1886, m. 1912, d. 16-Aug-1931)
Daughter: Hope Harding Davis Kehrig (author, b. 1914)
University: Lehigh University (expelled)
University: Johns Hopkins University (attended)
Harper's Weekly Review Managing Editor (1890)
The New York Sun Reporter (1889)
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Philadelphia Record Reporter (1886)
Expelled from School
English Ancestry
Risk Factors: Sciatica
Author of books:
Gallegher (1890)
Van Bibber and Others (1892)
Rulers of the Mediterranean (1894, non-fiction)
About Paris (1895, non-fiction)
Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America (1896, non-fiction)
Soldiers of Fortune (1897)
With Both Armies in South Africa (1901, non-fiction)
Ranson's Folly (1902)
Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis (1917, non-fiction)
Wrote plays:
The Littlest Girl (1895)
Soldiers of Fortune (1902, based on his novel)
The Taming of Helen (1903)
Ranson's Folly (1904, based on his novel)
The Dictator (1904)
Miss Civilization (1906)
The Galloper (1906)
The Yankee Tourist (1907)
Who's Who? (1913)
The Trap (1915)
The Girl from Home (1920)
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