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
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... woman was tall , slim - wasted , swan - necked , and stately , and was often accompanied by a dashing young man , modeled after Davis . Gibson's original illustrations for Soldiers of Fortune are included in this edition . 1 For a much ...
... woman — the tale had been unsigned in the Atlantic - and they soon began a correspondence . The letter writing grew into visits back and forth , and they married on 5 March 1861. Rebecca not only established herself as an important and ...
... woman . The story got even better : Kemmler was the first New Yorker sentenced to die in the electric chair on April 6 , 1890 . While still at the paper , Davis returned to the sort of fiction he had been writing for the Burr , and ...
... woman , Cecil originally turned down Davis ' pro- posal , but she relented and became his companion on many of his subsequent adventures : she traveled with him to South Africa in January 1900 , in order that he could report on the Boer ...
... woman ) -all this , and yet he barely breaks a sweat . A canny reader of the public's bellicose mood and a shrewd navigator of popular literary tastes , Davis takes up one of the oldest and most tried - and - true of literary genres as ...