Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis (pen name, "M. E. M. Davis") was a poet, short-story writer, novelist, playwright, memoirist, and one of the most commercially successful professional writers in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Her work was published by Houghton Mifflin and appeared in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Evening Post. She was a regular contributor to The Times Picayune and her salon in the French Quarter attracted national literati, giving local writers opportunities for publication. Although largely unknown today, her work was instrumental in creating the romantic portrait of the French Quarter that still endures. In 1855, at age 6, she moved with her family from Alabama to Texas and subsequently lived at Manchaca, San Marcos, Garden Valley, Tyler, and Galveston. At the age of sixteen she began writing for Tyler newspapers, and her poems attracted the attention of Edward H. Cushing of the Houston Telegraph. During the next five years, which she spent in Tyler and Houston, she wrote most of her best poetry and gained a statewide reputation. In 1867, when her family moved to Galveston, her poems appeared in the Galveston News and her first collection, Minding the Gap and Other Poems, was published by Cushing. In 1874 she married Thomas E. Davis, who in 1879 joined the staff of the New Orleans Times. Mrs. Davis, already nationally recognized as a poet, became a leader in social and literary life in New Orleans as she had been during the previous five years in Houston. During extended visits to her brother's family in Comanche, Texas, she conquered tuberculosis and collected story material. By 1889, when she became editor of the Picayune, her home had become a literary salon. Her works are divided between Texas and New Orleans backgrounds, between juvenile and adult literature, between poetry and prose, and between realism and romanticism.