• Biographical Information
• Critical Responses
• Works Published
• Selected Bibliography
• Author Website

Biographical Information

West Virginia-born author, journalist, and social worker Julia Davis is best known for her writings about the history of western Virginia and the role of her family in shaping that history. She was born in Clarksburg in 1900. Her mother, Julia McDonald Davis, died shortly after her birth from puerperal fever. Her father, John W. Davis, was active in public service and a law partner in the New York firm Davis-Polk. Davis represented his country as ambassador to the Court of St. James and later ran for president on the Democratic ticket, opposing Republican Calvin Coolidge. Such activities made parenting a challenge, and her grandparents—the Davises of Clarksburg and the McDonalds of Media, largely raised young Julia. She attended Wellesley College for two years (1918-1920) before completing a BA at Barnard College in 1922.

Julia Davis published her first book, Sword of the Vikings, in 1927. She followed that publication with more than twenty other books, primarily history and fiction, though she also published two autobiographical works—Legacy of Love, a memoir of her West Virginia childhood, and The Embassy Girls, a memoir of her time as an ambassador’s daughter in England. She also published two novels, The Devil’s Church and Cruise with Death, under the pseudonym F. Draco.

In addition to her writing, Julia Davis worked as an Associated Press reporter in New York City for a year. She was a children’s agent for the State Charities Aid Association from 1933-1938, and chair of the child adoption service of the Children’s Aid Society from 1962-1965.

Julia Davis died January 30, 1993, in Ranson, WV.

Critical Responses

Commenting on Julia Davis’s text accompaniment to Lucian Niemeyer’s photographs in the coffee-table book Shenandoah: Daughter of the Stars, the text an abridgement of a longer work, The Shenandoah, a history of the region she published in 1945 as part of Rinehart’s Rivers of America series, on reviewer said her text was “beautifully written” and “the perfect complement to Niemeyer’s evocative photographs.” Writing in praise of Legacy of Love, E. H. Smith of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review commented, “It is quite inconsequential, very slight, completely charming.” A Library Journal reviewer made a similar statement when she described Legacy of Love as “colorful reminiscences written with charm and insight.” N. K. Burger of the New York Times, writing about The Shenandoah, said

The book is a good introduction to the Valley. Miss Davis writes as the ladies of the Valley talk, mixing facts, anecdotes, and gossip as though they were one—which they might well be. At all events, the total effect is sound and achieves a truthfulness that formal history might easily miss.

Reviewers of other Julia Davis works have consistently commented on the warm expressiveness of her language and the emotional depth of her characters. Her stories feature men and women of rich human nature who face the difficulties that life places before them and seek to overcome them with determination and heroism.

Works Published

• Sword of the Vikings
• Vanio
• Mountains are Free
• Stonewall
• Remember and Forget
• Peter Hale
• No Other White Men
• The Sun Climbs Slow
• The Shenandoah
• Cloud on the Land
• Bridle the Wind
• Eagle on the Sun
• Legacy of Love
• Ride with the Eagle
• The Anvil
• A Valley and a Song: The Story of the Shenandoah River
• Mount Up
• Never Say Die: The Glengarry McDonalds of Virginia
• The Embassy Girls
• The Ambassadorial Diary of John W. Davis: The Court of St. James (editor with Dolores A. Fleming)
• Shenandoah: Daughter of the Stars (with Lucian Niemeyer)
• The Devil's Church (as F. Draco)
• Cruise with Death (as F. Draco)

Selected Bibliography

Duhamel, P. A. Eagle on the Sun (book review). New York Times August 12, 1956.

Ferris, John. The Embassy Girls (book review). The International History Review 118:2, May 1996.

---. Shenandoah: Daughter of the Stars (book review). The Virginia Quarterly Review 71:2, Spring 1995.

Legacy of Love (book review). Library Journal 86:3278, October 1, 1961.

Mount Up (book review). Horn Book 43:483, August 1967.

No Other White Men (book review). Booklist 33:346, July 1937.

Rosenberger, Coleman. Cloud on the Land (book review). New York Herald Tribune Book Review September 16, 1951.

Smith, E. H. Legacy of Love (book review). New York Herald Tribune Book Review November 12, 1961.

Author Website

none available