Bret Harte

Bret Harte (; born Francis Brett Hart; August 25, 1836 – May 5, 1902) was an American short story writer and poet best remembered for short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush.

In a career spanning more than four decades, he also wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials and magazine sketches.

As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. and later to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been those most often reprinted, adapted and admired.

Biography

Early life

Harte was born in 1836 in New York's capital city of Albany. He was named after his great-grandfather, Francis Brett. When he was young, his father, Henry, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte. Henry's father was Bernard Hart, an Orthodox Jewish immigrant who flourished as a merchant, becoming one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. Bret's mother, Elizabeth Rebecca Ostrander Hart, was from the English and Dutch culture and raised her child in a Dutch Reformed church. Later, Francis preferred to be known by his middle name, but he spelled it with only one "t", becoming Bret Harte. Harte was of French Huguenot and Dutch ancestry and descended from prominent New York landowner Francis Rombouts.

An avid reader as a boy, Harte published his first work at age 11, a satirical poem titled "Autumn Musings", now lost. Rather than attracting praise, the poem garnered ridicule from his family. As an adult, he recalled to a friend, "Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse."

His formal schooling ended when he was 13, in 1849.Scharnhorst, Gary. ''Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West''. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000: 4.

Career in California

Harte moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist; he was also secretary of the San Francisco Mint. He spent part of his life in the northern California coastal town of Union (now Arcata), a settlement on Humboldt Bay that was established as a provisioning center for mining camps in the interior.

The ''Wells Fargo Messenger'' of July 1916 relates that after an unsuccessful attempt to make a living in the gold camps, Harte signed on as a messenger with Wells Fargo & Co. Express. He guarded treasure boxes on stagecoaches for a few months, then gave it up to become the schoolmaster at a school near the town of Sonora, in the Sierra foothills. He created his character Yuba Bill from his memory of an old stagecoach driver.

Among Harte's first literary efforts was a poem published in ''The Golden Era'' in 1857 and, in October of that same year, his first prose piece on "A Trip Up the Coast". He was hired as editor of ''The Golden Era'' in the spring of 1860, which he attempted to make into a more literary publication.Tarnoff, Ben. ''The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature''. New York: The Penguin Press, 2014: 26–27. Mark Twain later recalled that, as an editor, Harte struck "a new and fresh and spirited note" which "rose above that orchestra's mumbling confusion and was recognizable as music". Among his writings were parodies and satires of other writers, includin
The Stolen Cigar-Case
featuring ace detective "Hemlock Jones", which Ellery Queen praised as "probably the best parody of Sherlock Holmes ever written". These parodies were reissued in book form in 1867.

The 1860 massacre of between 80 and 200 Wiyot Indians at the village of Tuluwat (near Eureka in Humboldt County, California) was reported by Harte in San Francisco and New York. While serving as assistant editor of the ''Northern Californian'', Harte was left in charge of the paper during the temporary absence of his boss, Stephen G. Whipple. Harte published a detailed account condemning the slayings, writing: " more shocking and revolting spectacle never was exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Old women wrinkled and decrepit lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long grey hair. Infants scarcely a span long, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds."

After he published the editorial, Harte's life was threatened, and he was forced to flee one month later. Harte quit his job and moved to San Francisco, where an anonymous letter published in a city paper describing widespread community approval of the massacre was attributed to him,. In addition, no one was ever brought to trial, despite the evidence of a planned attack and of references to specific individuals, including a rancher named Larabee and other members of the unofficial militia called the Humboldt Volunteers.

Harte married Anna Griswold on August 11, 1862, in San Rafael, California. From the start, the marriage was rocky. Some suggested that she was handicapped by extreme jealousy, while early Harte biographer Henry C. Merwin privately concluded that she was "almost impossible to live with".

The well-known minister Thomas Starr King recommended Harte to James T. Fields, editor of the prestigious magazine ''The Atlantic Monthly'', which published Harte's first short story in October 1863. In 1864, Harte joined with Charles Henry Webb in starting a new literary journal called ''The Californian''. He became friends with and mentored poet Ina Coolbrith.

In 1865, Harte was asked by bookseller Anton Roman to edit a book of California poetry; it was to be a showcase of the finest California writers. When the book, called ''Outcroppings'', was published, it contained only 19 poets, many of them Harte's friends (including Ina Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard). The book caused some controversy, as Harte used the preface as a vehicle to attack California's literature, blaming the state's "monotonous climate" for its bad poetry. While the book was widely praised in the East, many newspapers and poets in the West took umbrage at his remarks.

In 1868, Harte became editor of ''The Overland Monthly'', another new literary magazine, published by Roman Anton with the intention of highlighting local writings. The ''Overland Monthly'' was more in tune with the pioneering spirit of excitement in California. Harte's short story " The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared in the magazine's second issue, propelling him to fame nationwide and in Europe.

When word of Charles Dickens's death reached Harte in July 1870, he immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming issue of the ''Overland Monthly'' for 24 hours so that he could compose the poetic tribute "Dickens in Camp".

Harte's fame increased with the publication of his satirical poem "Plain Language from Truthful James" in the September 1870 issue of the ''Overland Monthly''. The poem became better known by its alternate title "The Heathen Chinee" after being republished in a Boston newspaper in 1871. It was also quickly republished in a number of other newspapers and journals, including the ''New York Evening Post'', the ''New York Tribune'', the ''Boston Evening Transcript'', the ''Providence Journal'', the ''Hartford Courant'', ''Prairie Farmer'', and the ''Saturday Evening Post''. Harte was chagrined, however, to find that the popularity of the poem, which he had written to criticize the prevalence of anti-Chinese sentiment among the white population of California, was largely the result of its being taken literally by the very people he had lampooned, who completely misconstrued the ironic intent of Harte's words.

Leaving the West

Harte was determined to pursue his literary career and traveled back east with his family in 1871 to New York and eventually to Boston, where he contracted with the publisher of ''The Atlantic Monthly'' for an annual salary of $10,000, "an unprecedented sum at the time". His popularity waned, however, and by the end of 1872, he was without a publishing contract and increasingly desperate. He spent the next few years struggling to publish new work or republish old and delivering lectures about the gold rush. The winter of 1877–78 was particularly hard for Harte and his family. He later recalled it as a "hand-to-mouth life" and wrote to his wife Anna, "I don't know—looking back—what ever kept me from going down, in ''every way'', during that awful December and January".

Some time between 1872 and 1881, Bret Harte rented The Willows, a Morristown, New Jersey

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