Author Description

At the turn of the century, Richard Harding Davis was the most dashing man in America. "His stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as were those of our own football captain; we knew his face as we knew the face of the President of the United States, but we infinitely preferred Davis's," wrote Booth Tarkington. "Of all the great people of every continent, this was the one we most desired to see." The real-life model for the debonair escort of the Gibson Girl, Davis. was so celebrated a war correspondent that a war hardly seemed a war if he didn't cover it. Describing the desperate charge of his friend Theodore Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War, he produced both a classic of battle reportage and a legend in American history. In his immensely popular short stories and novels, Davis created handsome young protagonists who were equally adept with a pistol and a fish fork--understandably, many readers confused these chivalrous heroes. with their author. Writers like Jack London, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway tried to emulate him in their lives and writing. In public, Davis presented the resolutely smiling face that the Victorian era demanded. His private side was darker. Like so many of his cheerful contemporaries, he was plagued by fits of depression, which he choked back in secret. His attachment to his formidable mother, herself a well-known writer, was. legendary. He didn't marry until he was thirty-five, and the union was apparently unconsummated. Only after his mother's death did he divorce his strong-willed, wealthy wife and marry a young vaudeville star. He died less than four years later, during the First World War, at the age of fifty-one. With death came ridicule, then oblivion. Davis epitomized all the virtues of the fin-de-siecle that the postwar era mocked. Looking back now, we can detect in this self-created, bumptious, ingratiating man the personification of his time--the adolescence of America. Arthur Lubow's absorbing biography takes us with Davis from youthful assignments at the devastating Johnstown flood and the first execution in the electric chair to the spectacular coronation of the last czar of Russia and the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. We meet Stephen Crane, William Randolph Hearst, Frederic Remington, and Stanford White. In Davis's company, we travel to the. battlefields of the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and the First World War, and to the high-society dinner parties of New York and London. As stylish and entertaining as its subject, The Reporter Who Would Be King brings to life an unforgettable era and a forgotten hero whose life is a study in the meaning and fleetingness of fame.