Bret Harte (1836-1902)

His Life:

Harte was born August 25, 1836 in Albany, New York, to a schoolteacher and his wife.

He developed an interest in literature early in life, reading the classics and composing poetry when a young child. By the age of eleven, Bret had published a number of poems. He was unhealthy and so was tutored at home, where he read such authors as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Washington Irving. When Harte was nine years old his father died, and around 1845, Elizabeth moved the family to Brooklyn, where Bret found odd jobs in a lawyer's office and for a druggist. Despite his extremely young age, Bret became a self-supporting young man at age fifteen.

His mother moved to California in 1853 and married one of her husband's former college friends. In late 1854, Bret and his sister, Margaret, joined the family in California. They traveled by steamship to California, a trip during which they encountered many unfortunate circumstances, to include storms at sea, revolutions, and shipwreck. These experiences helped to color Harte's later writings.

Harte's first years in California were not easy ones. He lived with his family for a few months, but then he sought out work anywhere he could find it.

During the next four years, Bret drifted from job to job until he became settled. He tutored the children of ranchers and even rode hotgun for a stage coach. During these years he kept a diary and he continued to write poetry. These experiences provided Harte with a valuable glimpse of frontier life and eventually supplied the inspiration for his most successful writings.

Over the next decade he held several jobs, most significantly that of apprentice printer for the journal Northern Californian, where he became an editor. His colorful stories about the West made California famous. After the transcontinental railroad was connected, the Easterners flocked out West to see this land of gold Harte described so vividly.

After his marriage in 1862, Harte supplemented his journalist's income by serving as a government clerk at the San Francisco mint. In 1865 Harte became editor of the Californian, where he commissioned Mark Twain, who was then a relatively unknown author, to write a weekly story for the journal. Regarding Harte's editorial influence, Twain later remarked that it was Harte who "trimmed and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters."

Harte became editor of the Overland Monthly in 1868, and during his tenure with the journal his poem "Plain Language from Truthful James" (also called "Heathen Chinee"), as well as such stories as "The Luck of the Roaring Camp," was published and inspired a "literary epidemic" of imitations. Afterward Harte received offers of editorial positions from across the country.

In 1871 he signed a one-year contract for $10,000 with the Atlantic Monthly, which gave the magazine exclusive rights to a minimum of twelve stories and poems and made Harte the highest paid American writer of the time. However, he was careless about fulfilling his contract, and it was not renewed. In need of a new source of income, he went on a lecture tour collaborated with Twain on a stage play, and then became a consulate in Crefeld, Germany, and, two years later, in Glasgow, Scotland.

He wrote stories for the last twenty-two years of his life, publishing a volume of short stories almost yearly. He was supported by a wealthy patron and moved to London in 1885.

He died in London in 1902.

Illustration Caption. -"Dickens in Camp," a poem by Bret Harte,
was illustrated in the Pacific Coast Fifth Reader.

In 1868, Harte founded and edited
San Francisco's literary magazine the
Overland Monthly.
At the time the Fifth Reader
was being prepared,
Harte was writing for the Atlantic Monthly.

Courtesy of Lee Lau

His Books:

He was passionate about the treatment of minorities and he was particularly digusted with the influence civilization was having on the West. Harte wasn't pleased with the effects that the railroad was having on the West, nor was he pleased with the way the white man was taking advantage of minorities, Indians, Chinese, and Mexicans to help settle the West. Both of these themes are shown throughtout his works.

Bret was appalled at these events, but writing about them in the weekly newspaper helped to make him popular. That is the irony of his writings. His stories reporting the lawlessness and the atrocities of the West made his articles more interesting to the readers.

Two of his most memorable pieces were published in a magazine, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat". In these two stories lay the formula for the western movies and books which would entertain our country for the next century. "These two stories deployed a cunning narrative strategy which insured their success with genteel readers. The tales argue that society's outcasts- whether gamblers, gold-seekers, prostitutes, or unemployed cowboys-all have hearts of gold"

Bret Harte's Gold Rush: Outcasts of Poker Flat, the Luck of Roaring Camp, Tennessee's Partner, & Other Favorites

Harte wrote many more books, but the stories of the Gold Rush are the ones that are remembered today.

These fifteen stories bring the California Gold Rush to life with their boisterous assemblage of rough-clad miners, pistol-packing preachers, iron-willed women, and philosophical gamblers. Theirs was an unpredictable world, filled with gold strikes and freak tragedies, when the wisdom of the gambler sometimes counted for more than that of the preacher; when normal rules were tossed aside and "the strongest man had but three fingers on his right hand; the best shot had but one eye."

A master storyteller, Harte weaves tales that seem to come directly from the campfire, where the spinning of yarns and swapping of lies were the highest form of entertainment. The stories presented in this volume, among his best, still have the power to engage us completely, to make us laugh out loud, and perhaps most surprisingly, to bring a tear to the eye.