![]() ![]() ![]() You were a sort of promise of something better to me. An experienced man, Clay has held a boyish fascination for her since seeing her picture in a society publication, motivating his career as prospector and manager of her father's mining operation in the fictional republic of Olancho so that, like Gatsby, he can win his own Daisy.Ĭlay's proto-typical Gatsby pre-occupations are so pronounced that it's impossible to believe that Fitzgerald was unaware of this book: "the great part of the inspiration I have had to do what little I have done came from you. In walks Robert Clay, a self-assured mining engineer, soldier and ex-cowboy. However, for Alice, the man 'who could give her something else besides approval of her beauty and her mind, had not (yet) disclosed himself.' Miss Alice Langham is a beautiful and accomplished heiress with all the suitors her circumstances would imply, the most eligible of whom is Reggie King, similarly wealthy and leisured, from the oldest and best of American families. In the words of Uncle Roger: haiya □□□ It was just boring and not my taste.īut yeah. So no, I don't really have a lot to say about this book. ![]() I'm only giving it two stars because it will definitely give me many Things to Say™ in class on Monday. Not to mention that the big tough cowboy machismo trope is so overdone, the Annie Oakley Western Girl™ was cringe, the romance was one of those "weird flex but ok" kinds, and I had to keep myself from throwing the book out the window many times. This book is *not* a critique of American imperialism and racism (as in the case with Faulkner or Twain), but it is an example of imperial and racist propaganda. It's sort of about the Spanish-American war, so I realize why they had me read it for my Imperialism class, but I found the plot very boring, the main American characters and the novel's tone was overtly racist, and I just couldn't come to like the amateur writing style. The appendices, which bring together primary materials by writers and politicians such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Jose Martí, Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, and others, address such issues as social Darwinism, masculinity, and ideas of Anglo-American superiority. A huge best-seller, the novel did its part to push the nation into war against Spain, and stands as one of the most important texts in the literature of American imperialism. Written on the eve of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune casts the young American as the dashing, hypermasculine hero of the new military and economic. When the coup, organized by corrupt politicians and generals, threatens the American-owned Valencia Mining Company, Clay organizes his workers and the handful of Americans visiting the mine into a counter-coup force. A romance of America’s nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary, and Hope Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, as they become caught up in a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. ![]()
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