Joseph Walker - Robin Hood

Joseph Reddeford Walker (1789 - 1876)

Born in Virginia, USA. He engaged in fur trapping and trading, also serves as a guide for exploratory expeditions.

«The last archer smiled scornfully and made ready.  He drew his bow with ease and grace and, without seeming to study the course, released the winged arrow.  Forward it leaped toward the target, and all eyes followed its flight.  A loud uproar broke forth when it alighted, just without the center and grazing the shaft sent by Rob.  The stranger made a gesture of surprise when his own eyes announced the result to him, but saw his error.  He had not allowed for the fickle gust of wind which seized the arrow and carried it to one side.  But for all that he was the first to congratulate the victor.

Richard Davis - The Reporter Who Made Himself King

Richard Harding Davis (1864 – 1916)

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He started as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia and then New York (1886–91). Later being a correspondent at the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, the First World War he became one of the most popular war reporters. He wrote Gallegher (1890), Cinderella and Other Stories (1891), Soldiers of Fortune (1897), With Both Armies (1900), Notes of a War Correspondent (1910), With the Allies (1914), etc.

The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the one who works his way up.  He holds that the only way to start is as a printer’s devil or as an office boy, to learn in time to set type, to graduate from a compositor into a stenographer, and as a stenographer take down speeches at public meetings, and so finally grow into a real reporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even excepting Police Captains.

Agnes Repplier - The Mission of Humour

Agnes Repplier (1858 – 1950)

Born in Philadelphia, USA. She wrote Books and Men (1888), Points of Friction (1920), To Think of Tea! (1932), In Pursuit of Laughter (1936).

American humour is the pride of American hearts. It is held to be our splendid national characteristic, which we flaunt in the faces of other nations, conceiving them to have been less favoured by Providence. Just as the most effective way to disparage an author or an acquaintance--and we have often occasion to disparage both—is to say that he lacks a sense of humour, so the most effective criticism we can pass upon a nation is to deny it this valuable quality. American critics have written the most charming things about the keenness of American speech, the breadth and insight of American drollery, the electric current in American veins; and we, reading these pleasant felicitations, are wont to thank God with greater fervour than the occasion demands that we are more merry and wise than our neighbours. Mr. Brander Matthews, for example, has told us that there are newspaper writers in New York who have cultivated a wit, "not unlike Voltaire's." He mistrusts this wit because he finds it "corroding and disintegrating"; but he makes the comparison with that casual assurance which is a feature of American criticism.