Harte, Bret (1836-1902), was an American author who became famous for his colorful stories about the West. His best-known works describe the California gold rush days of the mid-1800’s. Harte portrayed reckless and fascinating characters, including gamblers, miners, and prostitutes. His sentimental plots and character descriptions resembled those of the English novelist Charles Dickens. Harte presented vivid descriptions of mountain scenery and believable portrayals of prospectors and their slang. His descriptions helped shape a movement in American fiction called local color writing. This literary style tries to capture the feeling of some particular place and its people.
Harte was born on Aug. 25, 1836, in Albany, New York. His real name was Francis Brett Hart. He moved to California at the age of 17. After publishing several poems in 1857, he decided to be a writer. Two years later, Harte joined the staff of the Northern Californian newspaper. In 1860, he wrote an editorial that criticized white Californians for their part in a massacre of Native Americans. The angry townspeople forced him to resign. Harte later composed a clever series of 15 stories for a weekly magazine, the Californian. These stories were collected in a book called Condensed Novels (1867). In this work, Harte parodied several well-known novelists of the 1800’s. His major literary production of this period was “The Work on Red Mountain” (1860), later revised as “M’liss” (1863), a gloomy story of greed and gold.
From 1868 until early 1871, Harte served as editor of the Overland Monthly magazine. The August 1868 issue included his story “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Californians disliked the story at first because it showed California life as rough and unsophisticated and was sympathetic to the tough gold rush miners. But the story soon gained Harte a nationwide reputation.
Harte’s work in the Overland continued to gain popularity. His best-known writings from the magazine include two enduring short stories, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869) and “Tennessee’s Partner” (1869), and a humorous though unintentionally racist poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (1870), later published as “The Heathen Chinee.”
Harte became increasingly popular in the East. In 1871, he moved to New Jersey. But Harte’s popularity soon declined. He left the United States in 1878 and lived in London from 1885 until his death on May 5, 1902.