Bret Harte
Bret
Harte, original name Francis Brett Harte
(b. Aug. 25, 1836, Albany, N.Y., U.S.—d.
May 5, 1902, London, Eng.), American
writer who helped create the
local-colour school in American fiction.
Harte’s
family settled in New York City and
Brooklyn in 1845. His education was
spotty and irregular, but he inherited a
love of books and managed to get some
verses published at age 11. In 1854 he
left for California and went into mining
country on a brief trip that legend has
expanded into a lengthy participation
in, and intimate knowledge of, camp
life. In 1857 he was employed by the
Northern Californian, a weekly paper.
There his support of Indians and
Mexicans proved unpopular; after a
massacre of Indians in 1860, which he
editorially deplored, he found it
advisable to leave town.
Returning to San Francisco, he was
married and began to write for the
Golden Era, which published the first of
his Condensed Novels, brilliant parodies
of James Fenimore Cooper, Charles
Dickens, Victor Hugo, and others. He
then became a clerk in the U.S. branch
mint, a job that allowed freedom for
editorship of the Californian, for which
he engaged Mark Twain to write weekly
articles.
In
1868, after publishing a series of
Spanish legends akin to Washington
Irving’s Alhambra, he was named editor
of the Overland Monthly. For it he wrote
“The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The
Outcasts of Poker Flat.” Following The
Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches
(1870), he found himself world famous.
He furthered his reputation with “Plain
Language from Truthful James” (1870),
better known as “The Heathen Chinee,” a
poem that attracted national attention.
On it he based his best play, Ah Sin
(1877), a collaboration with Twain.
Flushed
with success, Harte in 1871 signed with
The Atlantic Monthly for $10,000 for 12
stories a year, the highest figure
offered an American writer up to that
time. Resigning a professorship at the
University of California, Harte left for
the East, never to return. In New
England he was greeted as an equal by
the writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, and William Dean Howells, and
was lionized and toasted to the point of
spiritual and moral breakdown. With
personal and family difficulties, his
work slumped. After several years of
indifferent success on the lecture
circuit, Harte in 1878 accepted
consulships in Crefeld, Ger., and later
in Glasgow, Scot. In 1885 he retired to
London. His wife and family joined him
at wide intervals, but he never returned
to the United States.
He
found in England a ready audience for
his tales of a past or mythical
California long after American readers
had tired of his formula. “Ingénue of
the Sierras” and “A Protégée of Jack
Hamlin’s” (both 1893) are perhaps better
than his earlier stories.
