“I always left my door open
So that they could come in without knocking.
I was never out.
They arrived with small hopes.
I sent them away with great hopes.
They sought me out because I was a good listener.
A man looking for a pair of ears
Hates to run up against a mouth.”
— Robert H. Davis, in a letter explaining his unusually cordial relations with writers, quoted in a 1919 newspaper article.
Davis, who became famous for giving many well-known writers their start, went to work for the magazine entrepreneur Frank A. Munsey in 1904, editing fiction for the company’s flagship, Munsey's Magazine. While Munsey himself seems to have held the magazine’s top editorial post until his death in 1925, Robert H. Davis was its editor as far as many writers were concerned, especially after it became an all-fiction title in 1921. Davis was also responsible for much of the content in other Munsey publications, including Argosy. He reputedly read, or at least skimmed, a million words a week.
With the boss's demise, Davis officially became the editor of Munsey's in 1925 and remained with the company until 1929. In the meantime he launched a career as a newspaper columnist and the author of numerous books. His new byline, Bob Davis, was soon familiar to a wide national audience.
By 1930, in fact, Davis had become such a celebrity that the makers of Lucky Strike cigarettes ran newspaper ads in which he endorsed their product, remarking, in part, that their “use of the Ultra Violet Ray in the ‘Toasting’ of the tobacco is a splendid example of achievement.”
As his fellow newspaper columnist O. O. McIntyre observed in 1933:
“No man at two different periods of life so acquired two directly antithetical reputations as Bob Davis. As Robert H. Davis he was for years a magazine editor rarely grooving out of his routine — a worn path from his editorial desk to his apartment.
“As editor, a discoverer of writers, he rarely wrote a line. About nine years ago he became Bob Davis, globe trotter, and in that time has written nine books and hundreds of newspaper columns. At the moment he is off for a long caprice in far away Iceland."
Davis died in 1942, at age 73, on a visit to Montreal.
In an editorial soon after his death, the New York Herald Tribune enumerated his accomplishments as an editor and author (as well as a photographer, playwright, world traveler, and “mighty fisherman”), before concluding:
“But it is as a person, warm, witty, quizzical, wise and so nobly equipped with the more attractive human qualities, that he will be missed most. He had one of the happiest of lives. It was the sort he deserved, and, somehow it is hard to see how he could have made it otherwise.”
Davis's surviving letters, manuscripts, and other papers seem to be almost as widely traveled as the man himself. Some of his papers reside at the New York Public Library, others at Syracuse University, and still others at Princeton.
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