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 44
... never equal the power of his mother's best work , she was his closest mentor and ally , and he often sought her out to discuss ideas for projects or to receive her comments on outlines and drafts.2 More impor- tantly for our ...
Richard Harding Davis Brady Harrison. Episcopal Academy and his weekly report never failed to fill the whole house with an impenetrable gloom and ever - increasing fears as to the possibilities of his future . At school and at college ...
... Never one to focus , he also turned to writing travel pieces and 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 ...
... Never one to rest - and never one to allow an opportunity to pass him by Davis , after trips to Moscow and Budapest , trav- 1 Richard Harding Davis , Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America ( New York : Harper and Brothers , 1896 ) ...
... never again be so important a player ; he would never again achieve the same levels of critical and popular success as a writer . His personal life would also never be quite the same again In 1899 , after several years of courtship ...