Publisher's Synopsis
A romance of America's nascent imperial power recounting the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary, and Hope Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, as they become caught up in a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. When the coup, organized by corrupt politicians and generals, threatens the American-owned Valencia Mining Company, Clay organizes his workers and the handful of Americans visiting the mine into a counter-coup force. Written on the eve of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune casts the young American as the dashing, hypermasculine hero of the new military and economic imperium.Richard Harding Davis was a popular writer of fiction and drama, and a journalist famous for his coverage of the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, and the First World War. Davis made his reputation as a newspaper reporter in May to June 1889, by reporting on the devastation of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, following the infamous flood and added to his reputation by reporting on events such as the first electrocution of a criminal.Davis became a managing editor of Harper's Weekly, and was one of the world's leading war correspondents at the time of the Second Boer War in South Africa. As an American, he had the unique opportunity to see the war first-hand from both the British and Boer perspectives. Davis also worked as a reporter for the New York Herald, The Times, and Scribner's Magazine.He was popular among the leading writers of his time and despite his alleged association with Yellow journalism, his writings of life and travel in Central America, the Caribbean, Rhodesia, South Africa during the Second Boer War were widely published.
