H. L. Davis is best known for his five novels--Honey in the Horn (1935), Harp of a Thousand Strings (1947), Beulah Land (1949), Winds of Morning (1952), The Distant Music (1957)--and his short stories, but he also wrote poetry, essays, and literary criticism. Both poetry and fiction are set primarily in the American West of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they are not "Westerns" in the usual sense. Although some deal with the settlement of the West and vividly evoke the western landscape, Davis's works are concerned with universals of human experience, examining such concepts as initiation, alienation, Christian patterns of sin and redemption, the nature of love, illusion and aspiration, and the proper uses of the past.

Harold Lenoir Davis was born in Rone's Mill, near Roseburg, Oregon. His father was a country schoolteacher whose frequent job changes during his son's childhood and early adolescence gave the boy...