History Minutes: Harold Lenoir Davis (1894-1960)

This Sesquicentennial History Minute is from the Oregon Encyclopedia, a state-wide project supported by Portland State University, Oregon Historical Society, and Oregon Council of Teachers of English, with generous support from the Oregon Cultural Trust.  This History Minute is written by Glen A. Love.

                           HL Davis

Born and raised in rural and small-town Oregon, Harold Lenoir Davis was the most innovative and influential writer of the post-frontier Pacific Northwest.  He was born in Nonpareil, a backwoods community near Roseburg, and the family eventually settled on the mid-Columbia River.  In his youth, Davis worked as cowpuncher, sheepherder, packer, surveyor, timekeeper for a railroad, and deputy sheriff for Wasco County.

Davis’s first novel, Honey in the Horn, published in 1935, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year.  With its distinctive narrative style and invigorating rendition of the natural Northwest, Honey in the Horn set a new standard for the region, indeed for all western American literature of the early twentieth century.

Though Davis had no formal education beyond high school and liked to portray himself as a working-class guy, he was widely read, spoke and read several languages, and was an accomplished guitarist and folklorist.

Davis teamed up in 1927 with James Stevens, another Northwest writer, to publish "Status Rerum," a scathing attack on the ineptitude of most Northwest literary efforts.  The free-swinging insults so offended the region's literary establishment that after the early 1930s Davis chose to live elsewhere, mostly in California and Mexico, though Oregon remained the home for his most memorable literary creations.