Richard Harding Davis once said that "There is no training for a novelist as thorough as that received in the local room of a daily newspaper." Davis served just such an apprenticeship at newspapers in Philadelphia and New York and remained a journalist throughout his writing career, believing that as such he made his most significant contributions to his age. Nevertheless, Davis produced an enormously popular body of fiction--both short stories and novels--which captured the spirit of the "Strenuous Age" and which earned for him the designation of an "American Kipling." Because his impressionistic journalism and fiction so closely mirror its era of Rough Riders and Victorian sentimentality, it was at odds with the naturalistic visions of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and other contemporaries. Davis's critical fortunes suffered further as Americans turned their attention to realists such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway...