Bret Harte - A Short Story Collection eBook

American writer and poet Bret Harte was born Francis Brett Harte in Albany, New York in 1836. Throughout his life, Harte also worked as a teacher, a miner, a journalist and an American diplomat in Europe. He is best remembered today for his iconic short stories, poems and articles about the California Gold Rush of the mid-19th century.

Although his formal education was sporadic and ended for good when he was only thirteen, Harte read and wrote from a young age. The earliest record of his published work cites a satirical poem called Autumn Musings, written when he was just eleven years old and published in the New York Sunday Atlas. After the death of his schoolteacher father in 1853, Harte’s family moved to Oakland, California where his mother had remarried (to Col. Andrew Williams, a future mayor of Oakland). Harte took up a series of diverse occupations before settling into a life-long career in letters.

Following several years of teaching and working as a miner further along the coast in Humboldt’s Bay, Harte became an editor and journalist with the weekly newspaper Northern Californian. After writing an editorial condemnation of the infamous 1860 massacre of a local community of Wiyot Native Americans by white settlers and vigilante militia, Harte’s life was threatened and he was forced to re-locate back to the San Francisco area. Here he continued to write, publishing his first poetry and prose pieces in The Californian and The Golden Era, both newly established literary journals. During the Civil War (1861-1865) Harte identified as an Abolitionist and wrote patriotic propaganda poetry.

Harte married Anna Griswold, with whom he went on to have four children, on August 11, 1862, in San Rafael, California. By all accounts the marriage was at times somewhat difficult. Now a family man, Harte supplemented his still meager earnings from writing and editing by briefly taking a job with the United States Mint. It was also around this time that he started using the pen name Bret Harte. He published a collection of poems called The Lost Galleon and Other Tales under this name in 1867.

In 1868, Harte became founding editor at The Overland Monthly, a literary journal that would publish Harte’s The Luck of Roaring Camp later that same year. The short story about an orphan child raised by prospectors made Harte’s reputation in North America and remains one of his best-loved works. The story is considered classic Harte with its exploration of physical hardship within an unforgiving landscape and the possibility of redemption for the colourful hardscrabble inhabitants who moved through it.

Other important Harte works published in Overland Monthly during Harte’s tenure there include Dickens in Camp, a tribute to Charles Dickens upon the death of the great author in 1870 and the narrative poem Plain Language from Truthful James (also known as The Heathen Chinee). Harte intended the latter as a satirical jab against anti-Chinese prejudice within the white working class. However, it was more popularly received as a mocking portrayal of Chinese Californians, then performing many of the most menial jobs in the mining camps and frontier towns of the West Coast. Harte later distanced himself from the work, calling it "the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote."

Also while at Overland Monthly, Harte famously commissioned work from a fledgling writer named Samuel Clemons with whom he would collaborate almost a decade later. Though younger than Clemons, Harte became established as a writer first and for a time he was a mentor to the man who would become Mark Twain, reading and critiquing early manuscripts.

By the time Harte left the journal in 1870, he was both well known and well paid, a star of the American literary scene. It’s not difficult to understand why. Harte’s emphasis on ...