The complete online text of The Amateur by Richard Harding Davis.

The American journalist Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) was also a fiction writer and dramatist whose swashbuckling adventures were popular with the American public. Richard Harding Davis was born into a well-to-do and rather pious Episcopalian family...

Richard Harding Davis may be better remembered in late-twentieth-century America for being the son of novelist Rebecca Harding Davis than he is for his own literary accomplishments. In late-nineteenth-century America, however, Davis epitomized the Americ...

Richard Harding Davis was one of the most colorful, daring, and attractive figures in journalism in the late 1800s and early 1900s; he was also highly competent, honest, and dependable. Because of his dashing life-style, which seemed never to impede his...

While there have always been amateurs--those who have taken time from their usual labors and obligations to pursue a disciplined study of some subject outside their usual sphere--their emergence as a distinct and somewhat curious class is recent. Indeed, William Haley, in his...

A stellar opportunity for amateurs Attention amateur astronomers: Bring out your best ideas for stargazing, and you may get to try them on the space telescope. Riccardo Giacconi, director of NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, is offering part of...

This week only: Mortgage rates fall and purchase mortgage volume at record high. Act now; numbers might change. (The Matrix) Boost your confidence with color-balanced bulbs in the bathroom, otherwise that pasty winter complexion might be all you notice. (The New York Times)...

IBM engineer Viktors Berstis can thank his mother for his piano playing talent.Berstis, who was born at a Latvian refugee camp near Nurnberg, Germany, was just 10 months old when his family moved to Michigan. When he was 7, his uncle began teaching him how...