Richard Harding Davis, managing editor of Harper's Weekly from 1890 to 1893 and for all his writing career a steady contributor to the evolving literature of the American magazine, was the first native American to gain international fame both as a war correspondent and as a chronicler of world affairs. Equally at home in Delmonico's restaurant, in the palaces of Europe, and on the world's battlefields, he was at once the mirror of fashion--he is the man escorting the Gibson girls in Charles Dana Gibson's drawings--and a model of rectitude.

A relentless self-promoter and a flamboyant man who was dismissed by his first newspaper editor for trying to write with his gloves on, Davis was the first American reporter to cultivate and to enjoy the peculiar but fleeting fame this country lavishes upon writers more popular than profound. Departing only once from the orthodoxies of his day, when, in late...