Davis, Rebecca Harding

Davis, Rebecca Harding,

1831–1910, American novelist, b. Washington, Pa.; mother of Richard Harding DavisDavis, Richard Harding,
1864–1916, American author and journalist, b. Philadelphia; son of Rebecca Harding Davis. After attending Lehigh and Johns Hopkins universities, he became a reporter in Philadelphia and later was on the New York Evening Sun.
..... Click the link for more information. . Her early nonfiction pieces, particularly those collected under the title Life in the Iron Mills (1861), and her first novel, Margaret Howth (1862), foreshadowed the naturalistic techniques of later 19th-century writers by showing how a dismal environment can warp character.

Bibliography

See her autobiographical Bits of Gossip (1904); biography by G. Langford (1961).

Davis, Rebecca Harding (b. Rebecca Blaine Harding)

(1831–1910) writer; born in Washington, Pa. (mother of Richard Harding Davis). Largely self-educated, she first attracted attention with "Life in the Iron-Mills" (Atlantic Monthly, 1861) and her realistic Civil War stories. Her novels portraying the bleak lives of factory workers (Margaret Howth, 1862) and African-Americans (Waiting for the Verdict, 1868) have gained her the reputation as a pioneer of American naturalism. After 1863 she lived in Philadelphia, the setting of much of her later work.