Richard Davis

Short Biography

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.