Russell Davenport
American editor and poet (1899–1954) — managing editor of Fortune and author of the book-length poem My Country — who framed Fuller for readers as "a poet in science."
Russell Wheeler Davenport was an American journalist, editor, and poet. As managing editor of Fortune magazine in the late 1930s he helped shape the ambitious, essayistic house style that treated business and industry as grand subjects for prose. He was also a serious poet, author of the long patriotic poem My Country (1944), and worked closely with Wendell Willkie during Willkie's 1940 presidential campaign. His writing consistently reached for the large view — reading American economic and industrial life as an epic worth narrating.
Relationship to Fuller
Relationship: chronicler. Davenport wrote the prose foreword, "Bucky Fuller's Notebook," that opens R. Buckminster Fuller's Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization. In it he introduces Fuller not as "a poet in words" but as "a poet in science" — a Leonardo-like figure whose medium is "the architecture of things in motion." The foreword sketches Fuller's biography (Boston, Harvard, the Navy, the 1928 coinage of "Dymaxion," and the Dymaxion car, house, and bathroom) and gathers numbered "gleanings" on industrial productivity and mechanical energy, closing with the "God is a verb" passage from Fuller's No More Secondhand God. The two moved in overlapping circles: Fuller served as a consultant to Fortune during Davenport's editorship, and Davenport's foreword remains one of the earliest sympathetic portraits framing Fuller's poem for a general readership.
See Also
- R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
- Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization (Untitled Epic Poem) — the Fuller work for which Davenport wrote the foreword
Sources
- Compiled from general knowledge and corpus mentions; anchored in this corpus by the foreword "Bucky Fuller's Notebook" in Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization.