Richard Beale Davis was born to Henry Woodhouse and Margaret Josephine (Wills) Davis in Accomack, Virginia on June 3, 1907. He earned his A. B from Randolph Macon College (1927) and his AM (1933) and PhD (1936) from the University of Virginia. He was later awarded a number of honorary degrees from such institutions as Randolph-Macon College, the College of William and Mary, and Eastern Kentucky University. Davis began his career as an instructor of English at the McGuire University School in Richmond, Virginia (1927-1930) and worked as a teacher at Randolph Macon Academy (1930-1932), as a teaching fellow at the University of Virginia (1933-1936), as an associate professor at the University of Virginia's Mary Washington College (1936-1940), and as an associate professor (1940-1946) and professor (1946-1947) at the University of South Carolina before coming to the University of Tennessee as a professor of English in charge of American Literature in 1947. He was honored as an Alumni Distinguished Service Professor of American Literature in 1962 and held this position until his retirement in 1977. Additionally, Davis held a number of visiting professorships at such institutions as the University of Texas, the Claremont Graduate School, and the University of Oslo. Among his published works are George Sandys, Poet-Adventurer (1955), William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World, 1676-1701 (1963), Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790-1830 (1964), American Literature through Bryant (1969), and Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, Volumes 1-3 (1978). Richard Davis died on March 30, 1981.