
author
1852–1909
A 19th-century Texas writer with a gift for local color, frontier memory, and magazine storytelling, these works capture regional life with warmth and vivid detail. She wrote poetry, fiction, and history, and built a literary career that stretched from newspaper work into nationally read books and periodicals.
Born in Alabama in 1844, Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis grew up in Texas and began writing for the press while still very young. She later became known by the pen name M. E. M. Davis and built a career as a poet, fiction writer, and editor.
Her work is closely tied to Texas and the American South. She wrote poems, short stories, novels, and historical pieces, and readers especially valued her lively depictions of regional life, folklore, and everyday people. Among her books are Minding the Gap and Other Poems, Under the Man-Fig, and The Story of Texas Under Six Flags.
Davis spent part of her career in New Orleans, where she was also active in journalism and literary circles. She died in 1909, but her writing remains a window into 19th-century Texas culture and the broader world of Southern letters.