Bret Harte

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Bret Harte

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Harte (credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born Aug. 25, 1836, Albany, N.Y., U.S. — died May 5, 1902, London, Eng.) U.S. writer. He briefly experienced camp life in California mining country before becoming a newspaper and periodical editor and writer. His works, which helped create the local-colour school in American fiction, include the short stories "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868) and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1869), the poem "The Heathen Chinee" (1870), and the play Ah Sin (1877; with Mark Twain). In an era when the West was a popular subject, these works made him internationally famous. His writing slumped in the 1870s, and he accepted consulships in Europe, never returning to the U.S.

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Biography: Francis Brett Harte

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Francis Brett Harte (1837-1902), known as Bret Harte, an American poet and fiction writer who specialized in local color and regional stories, set the fashion in fiction for a number of writers in the era following the Civil War.

Bret Harte, born in Albany, N.Y., had a somewhat sketchy education in the East before he followed his widowed and recently remarried mother and her family to the Pacific Coast in 1854. There he taught school for a year, visited the Mother Lode mining country, and worked briefly for an express company.

Early Career

Harte got his professional start between 1857 and 1860, when he was a journalist in Union, Calif. He moved to San Francisco, worked in government offices, and contributed writings to the Golden Era and the Californian which brought him prominence in literary circles. A collection of poems, The Lost Galleon, and a volume of parodies, Condensed Novels, appeared in 1867. The next year Harte became editor of a new West Coast magazine, Overland Monthly, and began to write a series of local sketches.

When stories set in the mining country, such as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat, " were read and reprinted in the East and elsewhere, Harte skyrocketed to fame. His renown increased when his comic ballad "Plain Language from Truthful James" - relating how Ah Sin, a Chinese gambler, outwitted two confidence men-became nationally famous.

By the time Harte's first collection of western local-color stories appeared in book form in 1870, eastern publishers were competing for Harte's services. In 1871 he signed a contract with the Atlantic Monthly at a record figure for an American writer - $10, 000 for 12 monthly contributions. He left California, never to return, and journeyed eastward, receiving a triumphant welcome everywhere.

Harte as Stylist

It seemed to his contemporaries that Harte had written the first authentic fiction about gold rush California on the basis of intimate knowledge. Actually he had arrived in the West several years too late, and was in the mining camps too briefly, to know them intimately. He did what most authors who achieve immediate success do - combined old elements with new ones in a way that initially seemed to be quite novel.

For one thing, Harte used the techniques of the fiction writer most popular in America during the 1860s, Charles Dickens - despite the deft parody of Dickens included in Condensed Novels. Harte repeatedly borrowed some of the very elements he had burlesqued - the linking of settings with moods and actions, and the creation of memorable characters by assigning them unusual names and grotesquely incongruous characteristics.

Harte also owed a debt to the most popular American writers of the day: the native humorists. He himself claimed that the unique qualities of the American short story derived from the native comic story, and in describing this genre he might well have been analyzing his own narratives: "condensed, yet suggestive … delightfully extravagant - or a miracle of understatement. It voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of a people or locality … often irreverent; it was devoid of all moral responsibility."

Like antebellum humorists, Harte stressed regional characters and mores. Like postbellum humorists, he used a style marked by fanciful figures of speech, unusual word combinations, and eccentrically shaped sentences. Not surprisingly, despite his frequent pathos, Harte was classified often as a humorist.

New Ingredient

When Harte appeared on the scene, American popular fiction was largely preachy and sentimental, showing noble characters doing noble deeds. The new ingredient in Harte's typical tale was another kind of character: his rough miners, prostitutes, dance hall girls, gamblers, and badmen proved that beneath their rugged exteriors beat hearts of gold. Many of these characters became stereo-types in western fiction, particularly in cowboy stories; so did others, such as the schoolmarm imported from the East and the aristocratic colonel from the South.

These qualities appeared in early tales and in later collections: Mrs. Skagg's Husbands (1873), Tales of the Argonauts (1875), An Heiress of Red Dog and Other Sketches (1878), and Colonel Starbottle's Client, and Some Other People (1892); and in novels: M'Liss (1873), Gabriel Conroy (1876), and Jeff Briggs's Love Story (1880).

As time passed, it became clear that Harte was repeating himself and that his powers - except in an occasional story - were waning. Two plays, one written in collaboration with Mark Twain, were failures. Domestic difficulties and personal problems were factors that prompted Harte to accept United States consulships in Germany and in Scotland. He went to London in 1885 and stayed there for the last 17 years of his life. His considerable reputation deteriorated steadily, and scholars eventually agreed that his chief importance derived from the fact that he set a fashion in fiction writing that would be adopted by many American writers, some of them great.

Further Reading

Geoffry B. Harte edited The Writings of Bret Harte (19 vols., 1896-1907) and Letters of Bret Harte (1926). Two good biographies are George Rippey Stewart, Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (1931), and Richard O'Connor, Bret Harte (1966). Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (1964), treats their relationship and its deterioration and reflects favorably on Harte.

Additional Sources

Stewart, George Rippey, Bret Harte, Argonaut and exile: being an account of the life of the celebrated American humorist …, New York: AMS Press, 1979, 1931.

Columbia Encyclopedia: Bret Harte

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Harte, Bret (Francis Brett Harte) (härt), 1836-1902, American writer of short stories and humorous verse, b. Albany, N.Y. At 19 he went to California, where he tried his hand at teaching, clerking, and mining. In 1868 he helped establish the Overland Monthly, where his short stories and verse first appeared. He gained enormous success with the publication of "The Luck of Roaring Camp," the first of his picturesque stories of Western local color, and with such later stories as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "Brown of Calaveras." Although Harte did not develop character and motivation, he had an observant eye and a brisk reportorial style. He was U.S. consul in Germany and Scotland from 1878 to 1885. The remainder of his life was spent near London.

Bibliography

See his letters, ed. by G. B. Harte (1926); biographies by R. O'Connor (1966) and A. Nissen (2000); M. Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (1964).

Works: Works by Bret Harte

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(1836-1902)

1860	The Work on Red Mountain. The author's first writing to gain notice is a novelette about a feisty but intelligent and beautiful young girl and the mysterious death of her father in a mining town during the early gold rush years. Published in the 1860 Golden Era, it would be expanded in the same periodical in 1863 at the request of readers and titled M'liss. The story would be collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870); a film adaptation starring Mary Pickford would appear in 1918.
1863	M'Liss. Harte's first popular success is an expansion of an earlier story, "The Work on Red Mountain" (1860). The story, about a young girl's adventures in California's gold mining camps, is serialized from 1863 to 1864 and would be included in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870) and published separately as M'Liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain (1873).
1865	Outcroppings. Harte's first book is an anthology of Californian poetry. His selections create controversy; many regard his subjects and style as low-bred and unrefined.
1867	Condensed Novels and Other Papers. First published in the Golden Era and the Californian, these works blend fiction and commentary in parodying the writing of Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Parker Willis, James Fenimore Cooper, and others. The "novels" bring Harte wide acclaim, and the North American Review calls him "a parodist of such genius that he seems a mirror into which novelists may look and be warned." He also publishes The Lost Galleon and Other Tales, which includes a collection of his poetry.
1868	"The Luck of Roaring Camp." Published in the second issue of the Overland Monthly (edited by Harte), the story, which has been described as the first example of local-color fiction, becomes immediately popular and wins the author a literary reputation and a national audience for the periodical. The story tells of a rowdy miners' camp, where the birth of Thomas Luck to a prostitute who dies in childbirth motivates the community to improve itself. Later a flood obliterates the camp and kills Thomas Luck. The story would be reprinted in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870).
1869	"Tennessee's Partner." Harte's third most frequently anthologized story (behind "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat") is a sentimental tale of a gambler and his devoted partner. It is first published in the Overland Monthly and would be collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870). Harte also publishes "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," a short story noteworthy for helping develop local-color writing that exploited regional customs, descriptions, and dialects. First published in the Overland Monthly, it receives wide acclaim. The plot concerns a gambler, two prostitutes, and a drunk who are thrown out of the Poker Flat mining camp and become trapped in a snowstorm with an innocent couple whose goodness inspires the outcasts. The story would also be collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870).
1870	"Plain Language from Truthful James." Harte's poem had been originally published in the Overland Monthly and became well known as "The Heathen Chinee" when it was pirated under that name. It tells how the gambler Bill Nye attempts to cheat the Chinese character Ah Sin at euchre, a popular card game in the late nineteenth century. Intended to defend the Chinese minority in California, the work is often mistaken for a polemic against that race. Harte would collaborate with Mark Twain on a dramatic version known as Ah Sin, the Heathen Chinee (1877).
1870	The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches. Harte's second story collection includes his best work, including the title story, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," "Tennessee's Partner," "Miggles," and "Brown of Calaveras." The stories, along with his comic ballad "Plain Language from Truthful James" (1870), establish Harte's popular reputation in the United States, prompting the Atlantic Monthly to offer him $10,000 for twelve contributions.
1871	East and West Poems. Harte's collection, like John Hay's Pike County Ballads (1871), popularizes the Mississippi River backwoodsman, or "pike," in a series of dialect verses.
1873	Mrs. Skagg's Husbands. The first in a series of collections of the writer's magazine writings, none of which duplicate the popularity of his earlier work. It would be followed by Tales of the Argonauts (1875), An Heiress of Red Dog and Other Sketches (1878), A Sappho of Green Springs and Other Stories (1891), and Colonel Starbottle's Client and Some Other People (1892).
1876	Gabriel Conroy. The longest of Harte's fictions is this novel depicting the early days of the California gold rush, featuring professional gambler Jack Hamlin, who appears in numerous Harte stories. The book is a possible source for the name of James Joyce's protagonist in his short story "The Dead." A second short novel, Jeff Brigg's Love Story, would follow in 1880.
1876	Two Men of Sandy Bar. Harte attempts to resuscitate his flagging career through drama with his first play, based on his earlier story "Mr. Thompson's Prodigal." It features two of his most successful characters, John Oakhust and Colonel Starbottle, along with a new character, Hop Sing, a Chinese laundryman. The play manages only a month-long run, with one reviewer calling it "the worst failing witnessed on the boards of our theatres for years."
1877	Ah Sin, the Heathen Chinee. The writers collaborate on a dramatic version of Harte's popular narrative poem "Plain Language from Truthful James." It manages only thirty-five performances as the writers could not agree on needed revisions.

Quotes By: Bret Harte

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Quotes:

"The only sure thing about luck is that it will change."

"Never a lip is curved with pain That can't be kissed into smiles again."

Wikipedia: Bret Harte

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For the census-designated place, see Bret Harte, California.

For the former professional wrestler, see Bret Hart.

Portrait of Bret Harte - oil painting by John Pettie (1884)^[1]

Francis Bret Harte (August 25, 1836^[2] – May 6, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.

1 Life and career
2 Criticism
3 Dramatic and musical adaptations of Harte's work
4 Other works
5 Legacy
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links

Life and career

He was born in Albany, New York, as Francis Brett Hart. He was named after his great-grandfather Francis Brett, and his family name was Hart. When he was young his father changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte. Later, Francis preferred to be known by his middle name, but he spelled it with only one "t", becoming Bret Harte.

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

The 1860 massacre of between 80 and 200 Wiyots killed at the village of Tutulwat was well documented historically and was reported in San Francisco and New York by a young American writer who would later use the pen name Bret Harte. When serving as assistant editor for the Northern Californian Bret Harte editorialized about the slayings while his boss was temporarily absent, leaving Harte in charge of the paper. Harte published a detailed account condemning the event, writing, "a 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 along, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds." After publishing the editorial, his 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 is attributed to him, describing widespread community approval of the massacre. In addition, no one was ever brought to trial, despite the evidence of a planned attack and references to specific individuals, including a rancher named Larabee and other members of the unofficial militia called the Humboldt Volunteers^[3].

His first literary efforts, including poetry and prose, appeared in The Californian, an early literary journal edited by Charles Henry Webb. In 1868 he became editor of The Overland Monthly, another new literary magazine, but this one more in tune with the pioneering spirit of excitement in California. His story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp," appeared in the magazine's second edition, propelling Harte to nationwide fame.

When word of Dickens' death reached Bret Harte in July 1870, he immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming publication of his Overland Monthly for twenty-four hours, so that he could compose the poetic tribute, Dickens in Camp. This work is considered by many of Harte's admirers as his masterpiece of verse, for its evident sincerity, the depth of feeling it displays, and the unusual quality of its poetic expression.

Bret Harte in 1868^[4]

Bret Harte's gravestone in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Frimley, Surrey, England

Inscription on gravestone

Determined to pursue his literary career, in 1871 he and his family traveled back East, 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."^[5] 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), delivering lectures about the gold rush, and even selling an advertising jingle to a soap company.

“

A whispering pine of the Sierras transplanted to Fifth Avenue! How could it grow? Although it shows some faint signs of life, how sickly are the leaves! As for fruit, there is none. America had in Bret Harte its most distinctively national poet.

”

Andrew Carnegie, Round the World^[6]

In 1878 Harte was appointed to the position of United States Consul in the town of Krefeld, Germany and then to Glasgow in 1880. In 1885 he settled in London. During the twenty-four years he spent in Europe, he never abandoned writing, and maintained a prodigious output of stories that retained the freshness of his earlier work. He died in England in 1902 of throat cancer and is buried at Frimley.

Criticism

Writing in his autobiography four years after Harte's death, Mark Twain characterized him and his writing as insincere. He criticized the miners' dialect used by Harte, claiming it never existed outside of his imagination. Twain damned Harte's habit of borrowing money from his friends with no intent to repay, his haughty attitude, and his financial abandonment of his wife and children.

Dramatic and musical adaptations of Harte's work

Several film versions of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" have been made, including one in 1937 with Preston Foster and another in 1952 with Dale Robertson. Tennessee's Partner (1955) with John Payne and Ronald Reagan was based on a story of the same name. Paddy Chayefsky's treatment of the film version of Paint Your Wagon seems to borrow from "Tennessee's Partner": two close friends—one named "Pardner"—share the same woman. The spaghetti western Four of the Apocalypse is based on "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "The Luck of Roaring Camp".
Operas based on "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" include those by Samuel Adler^[7] and by Stanford Beckler.^[8]

Other works

Plain Language from Truthful James, known also as The Heathen Chinee, was a satire of racial prejudice in northern California, but was embraced by the American public as a mockery of Chinese immigrants, and shaped anti-Chinese sentiment more than any other work at the time.^[9]

The Society upon the Stanislaus is a tragicomic poem, like Plain Language from Truthful James set in the northern California mining camps, and told by the same narrator, "Truthful James".

The Beulah song "Ballad of the Lonely Argonaut" references "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "Outcasts of Poker Flat" and asks, "How does it feel to roam this land like Harte and Twain did?"

Legacy

Bret Harte Elementary School in Long Beach, California
Bret Harte Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois
Bret Harte Middle School in San Jose, California
Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland and Hayward was named after him.
Bret Harte High School in Altaville, California is named after him and celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2005
Bret Harte Elementary in Cherry Hill, New Jersey
A community called The Shores of Poker Flat, California claims to have been the location of Poker Flat, although it is usually accepted that the story takes place further north.
Bret Harte Road in Frimley (the town in which Harte was buried) is named after him.
Bret Harte Road in Berkeley, California may be named after Harte.
Bret Harte Place in San Francisco, California is named after him.
Bret Harte Alley in Arcata, California, is named after him.
Twain Harte, California is a census-designated place (CDP) in Tuolumne County, California, United States. The population was 2,586 at the 2000 census. The name Twain Harte is derived from the last names of two famous authors who lived in California, Mark Twain and Bret Harte.
Bret Harte Elementary in Sacramento, California
Bret Harte Elementary School in San Francisco
In 1987 he appeared on a $5 U.S. Postage stamp, as part of the "Great Americans series" of issues.^[10]
Bret Harte Neighborhood in San Rafael, California, which includes Bret Harte Park, and Bret Harte Community Association [1]
Bret Harte Lane, Bret Harte Road, and Harte Ave in San Rafael, California.
Bret Harte House, at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.

Notes

^ Gerten-Jackson, Carol. "CGFA - John Pettie: Portrait of Bret Harte". CGFA. http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/p/p-pettie1.htm. Retrieved 2006-06-07.
^ Some sources say he was born in 1837. Even his gravestone has the wrong year 1837.
^ http://dscholar.humboldt.edu:8080/dspace/bitstream/2148/30/1/Crandell.pdf
^ O'Day, E. Clarence (August 1920). "Stories From The Files-Narrative Which Unexpectedly Made Bret Harte a Literary Celebrity". Overland Monthly LXXV (2).
^ Scharnhorst, Gary (2001). "Introduction". In Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, p. xvi. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-043917-X.
^ Andrew Carnegie, Round the World, The Project Gutenberg EBook
^ http://dram.nyu.edu/dram/note.cgi?id=8801
^ Organization at pikappalambda.capital.edu
^ Scharnhorst, Gary. "Ways That Are Dark": Appropriations of Bret Harte's "Plain Language from Truthful James". Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Dec., 1996), pp. 377-399.
^ Scott catalog # 2196.

Brooks, Noah (September 1902). "Bret Harte: A Biographical And Critical Sketch". Overland Monthly, And Out West Magazine XL (3): 201-207. http://books.google.com/books?id=1gYNAQAAIAAJ&pg=RA3-PA201. Retrieved 2009-08-15.

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		Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more
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