author
Franklyn Pierre Davis
1868–1932
A physician, editor, and anthologist, he moved easily between medical writing and literary culture. He is especially remembered for compiling the long-running Anthology of Newspaper Verse, a lively record of poetry as it appeared in American newspapers.
1 Audiobook
How to Collect a Doctor Bill
by Franklyn Pierre Davis
About the author
Born in 1868 and dying in 1932, Franklyn Pierre Davis was an American physician whose work reached beyond medicine into publishing and literary editing. Records for his books identify him as the author of the medical study Impotency, Sterility, and Artificial Impregnation, and library catalogs also list him as the editor behind volumes of Anthology of Newspaper Verse.
That anthology series became his best-known literary contribution. In introducing the project, Davis argued that newspaper poems reflected public feeling and everyday life, which gives the books an unusual charm today: they preserve the kinds of verse ordinary readers were actually encountering in their daily papers.
He is also remembered as an Oklahoma physician, a detail reflected in memorial records as well as in the range of his published work. Taken together, his career suggests a writer-editor with wide interests, equally drawn to practical medical subjects and to the popular poetry of his time.