- Listenly
- Public Library
- All Authors
- Rebecca Harding Davis
author
Rebecca Harding Davis
1831–1910
A sharp-eyed pioneer of American literary realism, she is best known for "Life in the Iron Mills," a powerful 1861 story that brought the harsh world of industrial labor into American fiction. She also worked as a journalist and wrote with unusual sympathy for people pushed to the edges of 19th-century society.
5 Audiobooks
Life in the Iron-Mills; Or, The Korl Woman
by Rebecca Harding Davis
Stories of Intellect
by Rebecca Harding Davis, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford
Stories by American Authors, Volume 1
by H. C. (Henry Cuyler) Bunner, Rebecca Harding Davis, Brander Matthews, Bayard Taylor, Albert Webster
Frances Waldeaux: A Novel
by Rebecca Harding Davis
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day
by Rebecca Harding Davis
About the author
Born in Washington, Pennsylvania, on June 24, 1831, and later associated with Wheeling, Rebecca Harding Davis became one of the early American writers to look directly at ordinary working lives instead of turning away from them. She graduated from the Washington Female Seminary in 1848 and went on to build a career as both an author and a journalist.
Her best-known work, Life in the Iron Mills, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1861 and is widely remembered as a landmark of American realism. The story stunned readers with its close, unsentimental view of industrial workers, and it helped secure her place as a pioneering voice in American literature.
Across her writing, Davis returned again and again to people facing poverty, injustice, and social exclusion, including workers, women, immigrants, and African Americans. That moral seriousness, combined with her clear, vivid style, gives her work a modern feeling even now.