In the years after our parents are gone, we miss them in different ways. My father, who died at eighty-seven in 1977, was a World War I hero and journalist who wrote for the Trenton Times, the Brooklyn Eagle, the Philadelphia Record, and the New York Herald Tribune; and I'll always regret that I never asked him whether he knew -- or perhaps once saw -- the great war correspondent, novelist, playwright, turn-of-the-century idol of American youth, Richard Harding Davis.

To see or meet Davis, as so many of his contemporaries recall, seems to have been an experience beyond our encounters with celebrities today. As handsome as the Arrow-shirt man and the Charles Dana Gibson sketches he inspired, he was not a "media" creation. Rather, his public image sprang from his life, his impeccable character; and his popular fiction -- in Collier's and Scribner's magazines -- mirrored, for better or worse, his social-whirl lifestyle, which was sometimes as grand as a battlefield in the Russo-Japanese War or as a small as his own corner table at Delmonico's. But wherever he was, to be near him was to catch the authentic excitement of what he wrote and the temper of the age he came to represent.

In the footsteps of William Howard Russell, the first of the war correspondents, whose reports immortalized the futile charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and his model, Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, who documented the Turkish atrocities against Bulgaria in 1876, Davis took up the correspondent's literary style and public persona that influenced Ernest Hemingway and found echoes in Edward R. Murrow.

Over the past twenty years his name has surfaced often in periodicals, newspaper columns, films, and conversations -- often in reference to his having been "forgotten." It's as if he has now become famous again, this time for having been forgotten.

The Davis story has been told four times: by his brother Charles, in his edited Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding David (1918); by Fairfax Downey, in Richard Harding Davis Years (1961), a study of both Davis and his mother, the realist novelist Rebecca Harding Davis; and in Scott C. Osborn and Robert L. Phillips, Jr.'s brief study, Richard Harding Davis (1978). Meanwhile, writer David Traxel is researching still another biography that promises to restore Davis's fame.

But while the story grows longer, our understanding has not always deepened. How could a "great" man disappear so fast? If he was but a fashionable blip on the screen of time, why more biographies? Arthur Lubow, who writes personality profiles for Vanity Fair, has been working on the The Reporter Who Would Be King for seven years. Now, drawing heavily on unpublished letters, diaries, and scrapbooks, some of which have not been available to previous researchers, he recreates Davis's life and social milieu -- from his birth in Philadelphia in 1864 to his sudden death at Crossroads, his beloved Westchester County estate, from a heart attack in 1916 at the age of fifty-two -- in an admirable and intelligent, if not totally satisfying, study.

Son of Clarke Davis, managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, whom a eulogist described as "personally less known to his generation than almost any editor of a large newspaper," and Rebecca, his literary mentor and critic, to whom he wrote virtually every day. Richard developed an exceptionally strong sense of individual morality. His nonsectarian "muscular Christianity" enabled him, as a student at Lehigh, to star at football and tennis and slug it out with sophomores rather than submit to hazing. Yet he was a snob, a fop who sported an ultra-English costume -- Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers -- with a cane crooked over his arm and a briarwood pipe between his teeth. He walked with his shoulders squared and his head erect and faked an accent, "a strange drawl, somewhere between the tones of upperclass Philadelphia and the diction of an English actor." When the faculty expelled him for terrible grades, he proclaimed, "But in a few years you will find that I have gone further than you will ever go.

He went to the Philadelphia Record, where the editor fired him for wearing kid gloves in the newsroom. Then to the Philadelphia Press, where he interviewed Walt Whitman, who remarked later, "Such tall, wholesome-looking fellows are rare among American youngsters"; and he covered the great Johnstown flood. But Philadelphia was cramping his style.

In 1889, New York, a city alive with the "new journalism," bursting with the creative competition between Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal, young Arthur Brisbane put Davis on the Evening Sun; and within a year his short stories, a series built around an empty-headed society clubman, Cortlandt Van Bibber, and one in Scribner's magazine about a newspaper office boy named Gallegher, made him, according to Lubow, "Byronically famous overnight."

Although his mother had warned him about the dangers of becoming a hack, for the rest of his life Richard Harding Davis was a writing machine, one of the most highly paid journalists in the world, but scrambling to pay his bills, dashing off Van Bibber stories in an hour, seizing the popularity of each new product to snare commissions for work -- travel writing, plays, reportage, stories, and novels -- and repackaging them into books, many illustrated by his friend Gibson, by Frederick Remington, and by Davis's own photographs -- and many of which now stand friendless on the used bookstore shelves of America. For the most part, his stories were ephemeral stuff, though some, like "The Bar Sinister" -- the story of an abused bull terrier who becomes a show dog, narrated in the dog's voice -- were greeted as masterpieces.

Yet this dazzling man was often a sick man, periodically crippled by sciatica, laid low by "nerve storms," depression, which Lubow attributes to repressed anger and which another author, Joyce Milton, in The Yellow Kids, attributes to arrested sexual development. In 1889, Davis married Cecil Clark, a painter and a long-time family friend, who accompanied him to the Boer War but refused to sleep with him. Davis honored the relationship with all the discipline a gentleman could muster; but in 1908, at forty-four, at the sight of a twenty-year-old chorus girl named Bessie McCoy -- known for a silly song she sang as "the Yama-Yama Girl" -- the he-man with the psychology of a perpetual boy reverted to a sexual late-adolescence. When Rebecca died, he divorced Cecil and married Bessie in 1912. Though the uneducated Bessie resented Richard's family and old friends, she and their daughter, Hope, filled his last years with joy.

Lubow concludes ambiguously that "the creation of his own personality was Davis's greatest achievement"; but if there is any way in which Davis speaks to us today, it is in his war reporting. What can the man who caught the thrill of Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill say to a generation that watched "smart bombs" devastate Baghdad on CNN? He might tell us that war, even if it must be fought, is a senseless waste, that glory is a lie.

Perhaps because he was so poorly educated, Davis, though critical of imperialism, brought only a superficial historical and geopolitical understanding to the international upheavals he observed. But he was a compassionate man and a brilliant, if impressionistic, observer. He scraped for fresh metaphors for the sound of bullets whizzing overhead -- the rending of silk? -- and did not flinch from recording the bloody corpses of American boys -- especially when an incompetent general, as in the Cuban campaign was, in his judgment, responsible for their deaths.

Almost up to the end, however, he was a cheerleader, siding, like a good sportsman, with the "underdog," through five and a half wars in eighteen years; the Greco-Turkish War in 1897, the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Boer War in 1900, the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the non-war with Mexico in 1914, and World War I in 1914-15.

In each he was subject to ridicule: he presumed to dine with generals; he sported a self-designed uniform, splendid with decorations, riding boots, a pith helmet, binoculars, and pistol; he carted along formal evening clothes, a "lovely green" tent, tables, chairs, a folding bed, and a famous rubber tub for his daily cold-water baths.

Richard Harding Davis was also a very brave man. Guilt-ridden because he had turned down an army commission in order to report the Spanish-American War rather than fight it, he threw himself into combat as if he were bullet-proof. In 1914, caught behind German lines outside Brussels, he was almost executed as a spy. "I am Richard Harding Davis!" he cried indignantly to his captors, as if the incantation of his name had the same magic in Belgium as on Broadway. In 1915 he stood in the cathedral of Reims while German shells crashed through the five-century-old roof and stained glass windows.

He was quick to realize that the international cable system, in place for the Russo-Japanese War, had ended the Great Age of the foreign correspondent: once the world -- that is, the people -- had immediate access to war news, it was no longer to the government's advantage to give the press free access to the facts. His deeper insight -- one which Lubow does not seem to fully appreciate -- was that war itself, which he had once treated as an adventure, was a stupid, tragic waste. Lubow does justice to Davis's classic terrifying depiction of the German army, in August 1914, marching into Brussels, ". . . a force of nature, like a tidal wave, an avalanche or a river flooding its banks . . . as the swollen waters of the Conemaugh Valley swept through Johnstown . . ."; but he shortchanges, as a "heated story," Davis's more significant reaction to the Germans' burning of Louvain. "In other wars I have watched men on one hilltop, without haste, without heat, fire at men on another hill, and in consequence on botsides good men were wasted. But in those fights there were no women and children, and the shells struck only vacant stretches of veldt or uninhabited mountainsides. . . ." But this was a war against helpless women and children, against civilization itself. Davis's whole career must have flashed before him in those flames.

In his perceptive study of Davis's fiction, an unpublished 1968 master's thesis (one of the few sources Lubow missed), John Solensten connects Davis's reports on the invasion of Belgium with his last, best short story, "The Deserter," based on a 1915 incident in Salonika where Davis and some fellow correspondents had dissuaded a disillusioned young ambulance driver -- his uniform stained with mud, blood, and melted snow -- from deserting. The boy stays, but tells the newsmen to go to hell. Lubow attributes the unusual hard-edged irony of the story to Davis's sense of what his audience, the future Lost Generation, would bear. Other readers may see that the fifty-one-year-old Davis, a frustrated and beaten man, had become painfully aware that the chivalric ideals to which he had given his life were fading illusions. Small wonder that he died within a year.

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