Richard Harding Davis

Davis was born on April 18, 1864 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent writer in her day. His father, Lemuel Clarke Davis, was himself a journalist and edited the Philadelphia Public Ledger. As a young man, Davis attended the Episcopal Academy. In 1882, after an unhappy year at Swarthmore College, Davis transferred to Lehigh University, where his uncle, H. Wilson Harding, was a professor. While at Lehigh, Davis published his first book, The Adventures of My Freshman (1884), a collection of short stories. Many of the stories had originally appeared in the student magazine the Lehigh Burr. In 1885, Davis transferred to Johns Hopkins University.

Davis was married twice, first to Cecil Clark, an artist, in 1899, and, following their 1912 divorce, to Bessie McCoy, an actress and vaudeville performer, who is remembered for her signature "Yama Yama Man" routine. Davis and Bessie had a daughter, Hope.

Davis had success with his 1897 novel Soldiers of Fortune, which he turned into a play written by Augustus Thomas. His novel was filmed twice, in 1914 and in 1919 by Allan Dwan. The 1914 version starring Dustin Farnum was shot on the Cuban locations that Davis used in his novel, and Davis was present during the filming.

Davis died of a heart attack on April 11, 1916, while on the telephone. It was seven days before his 52nd birthday. His friend and fellow author John Fox, Jr. was surprised by his sudden death, writing, "He was so intensely alive that I cannot think of him as dead—and I do not. He is just away on another of those trips and it really seems queer that I shall not hear him tell about it." His wife Bessie would also die young, at age 42 in 1931 from intestinal problems.