Life and Career
Davenport was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the son of Russell W. Davenport, Sr., a vice president of Bethlehem Steel, and Cornelia Whipple Farnum.
He served with the U.S. Army in World War I and received the Croix de Guerre. He enrolled at Yale University and graduated in 1923, where he was classmate of Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, who founded Time magazine. While at Yale he became a member of the secret society Skull and Bones. In 1929, he married the writer Marcia Davenport; they divorced in 1944. He joined the editorial staff of Fortune magazine in 1930 and became managing editor in 1937.
At age forty-one, he turned to politics and became a personal and political advisor to Wendell Willkie. Willkie was the Republican nominee for the 1940 presidential election and lost the election to Franklin D. Roosevelt. After Willkie's death in 1944, Davenport became a defacto leader of the internationalist Republicans.
Following World War II, he was on the staff of Life and Time until 1952. His book The Dignity of Man was published posthumously in 1955.
Read more about this topic: Russell Davenport
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)