Major Works

"The Outcasts of Poker Flat"

"Plain Language from Truthful 
James"

"The Argonauts of 49" or
"California's Golden Age" (lecture)"

" Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands, and
 Other Sketches" 

"My Metamorphosis 

Family

• Father: Henry Harte
• Mother: Elizabeth Rebecca Oatrander Harte
• Siblings: 3
• Wife: Anna Griswold Harte
• Children: Griswold, Francis, Jessamy, Ethel

Homes

• Albany, New York
• New York City
• Brooklyn, New York
• Oakland, California
• Union, California
• San Francisco, CA
• Chicago, Illinois
• Morristown, New Jersey
• Boston, MA
• Crefeld, Germany
• Glasgow, Scotland
• London, England

Occupations

• teacher
• private tutor
• drug store clerk
• miner
• Wells Fargo messenger
• printer, reporter, typesetter, assistant editor
• lecturer
• poet 
• author
• editor, Overland Monthly
• US Consul, Germany
• US Consul, Scotland

Chronology

Resources

The Bret Harte Page: Chronological 
list of Harte's Poems.  Some of which
are available on line. 
http://accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/
harte.htm
 
 
 

updated july 31,2001

Bret Harte, 1836-1902

Life

Francis Bret Harte was born in Albany New York on August 25, 1839 to a teacher and school administrator, Henry Harte, and Elizabeth Rebecca Ostander Harte.   He  acquired a love of poetry and literature at an early age and by age eleven had already published some poems.  At the age of thirteen, his father died and Harte was forced to quit school and go to work to help support his family.  By the time Harte was living in Brooklyn New York with his family where he worked odd jobs as a messenger, a drug store clerk, and doing some tutoring. 

 In 1853 Harte's mother moved to Oakland, California and remarried.  In 1854 Harte along with his sister joined the rest of the family.  Their he found his true calling.  He obtained his first job at a newspaper, the Northern Californian.  the pay was petty and the hours were long but he kept at it.  He was freelancing poetry and romantic prose to Eastern magazines as well as San Francisco's Golden Era.  At the age of 21 Harte decided to devote the rest of his life to his writing no matter what the cost.

His writing cost him his job three years later when he took the Indian's side in his Northern Californian report on the notorious "Gunther's Island Massacre".  He wrote of some 60 peaceful Native Americans, including women and children, being slaughtered by whites.  The readers of the paper didn't take to kindly to Harte's betrayal and he was run out of town.

Harte then moved to San Francisco went to work as a typesetter at The Golden Era. There he contributed regularly to the journal pages, signing himself as "Bret" or "The Bohemian".  Over the next three years more than a hundred of Harte's tales, essays, and sketches were featured in the Golden Era. The pay there was also poor but it gave Harte many contacts among San Francisco's rapidly growing literary enthusiasts.  In 1861 fellow author and friend Jessie Benton Fremont, and her politician husband John, helped Harte get a job with the local surveyor-general.  He left immediately.  Two years later he was appointed as Secretary of the San Francisco branch of the United States Mint, where he served for six years.

Working at the mint was perfect for Harte, since his responsibilities there were minimal and it left time for him to start a family, and he did with his marriage to Anna Griswold, a New York woman, in August 1862.  His job also gave him free time to work on his writing. 

Harte became an avid supporter of Abraham Lincoln and wrote many poems, essays, and parodies to stir patriotic enthusiasm among his California readers.  His writings were submitted to The Californian and the Golden Era and were published.  He even took on some editing tasks for The Californian over the next two years.

In 1865, Anton Roman, a Bavarian publisher, book dealer, and owner of a fashionable book store, approached Harte with the idea for Outcroppings, California's first poetry anthology.  He gathered 42 selections from 19 of the cities sprouting artists and added a rather skeptical introduction.  The book got an extremely negative response.  The San Francisco News Letter reported that "the country poet's were in a state of fearful excitement".  Harte was not included in a second compilation published just months after Outcroppings.

Then in 1868 he became editor of The Overland Monthly, which was San Francisco's newest journal.  Harte's story "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared in the second issue and Harte received almost instant fame.  In 1869 he published "The Outcasts of Poker Flat"  which reads as a tragedy even though Harte is known for his humor, and then in 1870, Bret Harte published "Plain Language from Truthful James" (better known as "The Heathen Chinee"), a humorous poem that condemned cheap Chinese labor.  Harte was not happy with the poem but the rest of the English-speaking world loved it and it boasted the sales of Harte's book, "The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches".  He felt that he would be able to make it as an author in New York so he left San Francisco to move East,  February 2, 1871.

The editors of Atlantic Monthly magazine was sure that Harte had what was needed to sell their magazine.  They were so sure in fact that they offered him $10,000 for one year with at least 12 stories.  Harte did fill his obligation with the Atlantic Monthly but the editors were not satisfied with the quality of his work and did not renew his contract.  He was left to try making it  in the East Coast freelance market.  He wrote a novel, Gabriel Conroy in 1876, and composed two plays, including Ah Sin, which he wrote in 1877 with Mark Twain, who befriended Harte andlater gave Harte credit for teaching him to write literature.  The play bombed at the box office and caused tention between the two of them.  Twain later had negative thigns to say about Harte and the friendship ended.

Bret Harte and his wife, Anna were always careless with money and so they squandered it all.  He tried to recoup his fortune by going on extensive lecture tours as Twain had but Harte didn't like the long hours and gave it up.
Feeling desperate, he took the advice of friends and accepted a position as US Consul in Germany in June 1878 and left his wife and three children behind never to return.  In 1880 he was transferred to Glasgon, Scotland in 1885 where he served for 5 years.  He then retired and moved to London.  He continued to write and publish his works until he died of throat cancer in 1902 while staying at the villa of a friend and former diplomat in Camberely, England. 
 

Literature and Journalism

Harte, an american writer of short stories and humorous verse, made a name for himself by writing stories about the wild west that everyone in the east wanted to know about, eventhough he did not experience most of the things that he wrote about.  He wrote of things that he had heard and read about as well as what he had actually experienced during the journeys of his own life.
He gained the respect of many writers early in his career but it was shamefully taken from him when he caould continue to dazzled his audience any longer.  As times changed, the readers looked for something new and did not accept the same work written by Harte that they had loved for many years.

Even though Harte had encountered some problems on his way to fame, he was still respected by many writers.  These writers sought him out for advice, including one newspaperman by the name of Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the name "Mark Twain".

Harte continued writing in much the same style for over thirty years, and though his loyal readers remained interested in his work, it was his first group of stories that made him famous and kept him a high level of respected in the world of literature. It is easy to understand why the readers were so enthusiastic of the story that Bret Harte told.  The life and scenery that he wrote about was new in literature and sounded exciting to the readers. 

The gold rush brought an extraordinary mixture of people to the west, which also brought many stories to be told.  Bret Harte went West just in time to see what was happening first hand and to mingle with the people that the gold brought. 

The tradition of the short story had already been established in America, and to the various species of it had been perfected by Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, Harte added another as distinctive as any. Stories like “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” have a serious interest as pictures of a phase of American life which already seems far away; but their attractiveness is still more due to the skill they display in the sketching of types, to the pathos which they reveal in the most unlikely characters, and to the restraint and concentration with which the stories are told. (W. A. N.)

Although Bret Harte was a well-respected journalist at his time, his literature is what won his fame.  He used his position with newspaper and magazine to publish his literature, which eventually made him a household name in his time.  Maybe since literature was his first and true love, we could say that he used journalism to get his literature out to the public.

Bret Harte’s poetry is not as popular as his fiction but he has one or two of the most successful humorous poems in our literature today.
 
 

Works Cited

Harper, Wilhelmina and Peters, Aimee M., The Best of Bret Harte, 1947

Golemba, Henry L.,  Wayne State University,  Bret Harte,  DLB 74,  American
 Short-Story Writers Before 1880. 

Fleming, Charles A., Oklahoma State University,  Bret Harte,  DLB 79. 

Webb, Dottie. "Local Color: 19th Century Regional Writing in the United States
 Bret Harte: Popularity, Poetry, and Performance." 23 August 1998 
 <http://kermit.traverse.com/people/dot/harte_anxiety.html>