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. |
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... adventure tale , Soldiers was the third best- selling novel of the year behind Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis , a tale of early Christians , and James Lane Allen's The Choir Invisible , a historical romance , and like Harriet Beecher ...
... adventure ; Rudyard Kipling ( 1865-1936 ) , British author and Nobel laureate best known for his works set in India during the Raj , including The Jungle Book ( 1894 ) and Kim ( 1901 ) ; John Singer Sargent ( 1856-1925 ) , Ameri- can ...
... adventure or war to another , from one remote outpost or world capital to another . He was always on the look- out ... Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis ( New York : Charles Scribner's Sons , 1917 ) , compiled and edited by ...
... more importantly for his career , covering crime in Philadelphia's impoverished , 1 Davis , Adventures and Letters , 2 . immigrant neighborhoods.1 Adopting a costume appropriate to seedy dives , SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE 15.
... adventure tales , and at the end of 1890 quit his job as a reporter at the Evening Sun to become the managing editor at Harper's Weekly . The next five years were a remarkably productive time for Davis . His first book , Gallegher and ...