Soldiers of Fortune

Front Cover
Broadview 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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Contents

I
7
II
9
III
33
IV
37
V
39
VI
225
VII
226
VIII
227
XIX
239
XX
241
XXI
243
XXII
244
XXIV
245
XXV
248
XXVI
251
XXX
252

IX
228
X
229
XI
230
XII
231
XV
232
XVI
235
XVII
236
XVIII
237
XXXI
255
XXXII
257
XXXIII
258
XXXV
260
XXXVI
261
XXXVII
262
XXXVIII
265
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Brady Harrison is Associate Professor of English at the University of Montana. He is the author of Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature (University of Georgia Press, 2004).

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