author
Mary Hayes Davis
d. 1948
A writer, editor, and publisher with an adventurous career, she is best remembered for helping bring Chinese folk tales to English-speaking readers in the early 1900s. Her life also stretched far beyond books, into journalism, local business, and movie theaters in Florida.
1 Audiobook
Chinese fables and folk stories
by Mary Hayes Davis, Chow-Leung
About the author
Born around 1884, Mary Hayes Davis was an American writer, newspaper editor, and publisher. She is best known as the co-author of Chinese Fables and Folk Stories (1908), created with Reverend Chow Leung while she was based in Chicago. The book was presented as an early English-language collection of Chinese tales and has continued to be reprinted.
Her career was notably wide-ranging. In addition to writing and publishing, she later became active in southwest Florida, where she worked in local journalism and also owned several movie theaters. That mix of literary, editorial, and business work gives her story an unusual energy.
Davis died on May 18, 1948. Though she is not widely known today, her name endures through a book that helped introduce generations of readers to traditional Chinese stories.