Soldiers of FortuneBroadview Press, 2006 M06 2 - 272 pages A romance of America’s nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary, and Hope Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, as they become caught up in a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. When the coup, organized by corrupt politicians and generals, threatens the American-owned Valencia Mining Company, Clay organizes his workers and the handful of Americans visiting the mine into a counter-coup force. Written on the eve of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune casts the young American as the dashing, hypermasculine hero of the new military and economic. A huge best-seller, the novel did its part to push the nation into war against Spain, and stands as one of the most important texts in the literature of American imperialism. The appendices, which bring together primary materials by writers and politicians such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Jose Martí, Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, and others, address such issues as social Darwinism, masculinity, and ideas of Anglo-American superiority. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 89
... by permission of the publisher from The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt , Volume I , ed . Elting E. Morison . Cambridge , MA : Harvard UP , 1951. ) Introduction In January 1897 , Richard Harding Davis , in SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE 7 I.
... soldier of fortune " - [ Julian ] Ralph called the corre- spondent a " knight of the pen " from our " free and enlightened land " -the reporter's worldly experience ostensibly baptized him as an American representative . Thus , when he ...
... Soldiers . Upon his return , he took up his father's profession and began his ascent , with a few bumps along the way , of the literary and social worlds of fin de siècle America . With his father's assistance , Davis secured a position ...
... narrow strip of land connecting two larger territories ; hence , anyone who lives in Central America may be referred to as an " isthmian . " he needs is to have a protectorate established over him SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE 17.
... Soldiers of Fortune . After his return from Latin America in the spring of 1895 , Davis resumed work on Soldiers while summering in Marion , Massachusetts . As Lubow recounts , the novelist wrote his most bellicose romance under the ...