David Davidson was born in New York, and received degrees from City College and Columbia University. For ten years he was a newspaperman in the U.S. and abroad. He published a few short stories, attempted a play, and had produced nearly two thousand radio scripts. From 1942 until 1945, he was with the Office of Inter-American Affairs in South America, Washington, and New York; and for the following year, he traveled in Germany, helping to build an anti-Nazi press. He came home and wrote the first of three novels, each about Americans in one or more of the countries in which he had lived: The Steeper Cliff, 1947 (Germany); The Hour of Truth, 1949 (South American countries); and In Another Country, 1950 (England, where he had lived in 1931 while on a traveling scholarship from Columbia). His first television play was produced in 1950; after that time he wrote several serious and semi-documentary dramas each year, chiefly for such shows as Playhouse 90, Alcoa Theatre, Kraft TV Theatre, Armstrong Circle Theatre, and The Elgin Hour. The death of many of these anthology programs appears to have forced him into new directions: in 1962 he wrote three scripts for the Saints and Sinners series, and three for the FDR series, which was scheduled for late 1963.
He and his wife, Hilde, lived in New York City. They had one daughter, Carla, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin.
