Rebecca Harding Davis

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) was an American writer and journalist, a pioneer of literary realism. Raised in Wheeling, in what is now West Virginia, she drew on the mill town around her for "Life in the Iron-Mills," published anonymously in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861, which brought the lives of industrial workers into American fiction. After marrying the Philadelphia journalist L. Clarke Davis, she wrote novels such as Margret Howth and Waiting for the Verdict, hundreds of stories and essays, and editorials for the New York Tribune. Her son was the journalist and novelist Richard Harding Davis.