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Davis, Rebecca Harding
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Rebecca Harding Davis shocked readers with the grim realism of her stories, which appeared during a time when sentimental romances were popular. Her first published story, "Life in the Iron Mills," appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861. The daughter of a prosperous businessman, Rebecca Harding grew up in Wheeling (then in Virginia) on the Ohio River. There she observed the industrial ironworkers' misery and struggle for existence and witnessed the harsh treatment of slaves, which she described in her first novel, Margaret Howth: A Story of Today (1862). She warned her son, writer and journalist Richard Harding Davis, against doing "hack work for money."
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