Richard Harding Davis

Richard Harding Davis was a best-selling novelist and playwright, but is most famous for being the first American war correspondent during the Spanish-American War. His reporting helped create the legend of the Rough Riders, which boosted the repuation and political career of Theodore Roosevelt. Davis was instrumental in the evolution of the American magazine, and his clean-shaven good looks were the model for the Gibson Man, created by artist Charles Dana Gibson at the turn of the twentieth century. At one point, he had three plays running simultaneously on Broadway, and two of his books were made into films.