Bret Harte Biography

Francis Brett Harte, who attained fame with two short stories and a humorous poem, is best known in literary history for his short stories of the West. Of Jewish, Dutch, and English descent, Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, in 1836. His indigent parents moved from city to city in the East until, after the death of the father, his mother remarried and moved to California; Harte and his sisters followed her, and during the next few years he was engaged in school teaching, typesetting, mining, politics, and finally journalism.

In 1857, Harte became a typesetter on the Golden Era in San Francisco. Though serving in a nonliterary capacity, he wrote poems and local-color sketches on the side, and in 1865 he edited a book of Western verse, Outcropping. In 1868, he was made editor of the newly founded Overland Monthly in San Francisco. The second issue contained his story “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” and in January, 1869, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” appeared in the same magazine. Though both caught the approving attention of readers in the East, the accidental publication of his poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” (familiarly known as “The Heathen Chinee”) produced his greatest popularity. It resulted in an offer, which he accepted, of $10,000 to write for The Atlantic Monthly for a year, and in 1871 he left for the East. The volume East and West Poems appeared that same year. However, his work soon declined in popularity, and, running into debt after the failure of a magazine venture, he entered the United States consular service. After posts in Germany and Scotland, he lost his political appointment in 1885 and moved to London, where he remained, isolating himself from his past, until...