Francis Bret Harte (1836-1902)

Bret Harte was a writer of the gold-rush period in America. Towards the middle of the 19th century gold was discovered in California and thousands of adventurous young men rushed to the West in the naive belief that it would be easy to become suddenly rich in the gold-fields. Greed for riches prompted most of the gold-seekers, but many came because they desperately wanted to be free of the constant threat of poverty that haunted them. The gold-rush also attracted gamblers, thieves and other criminal elements who came to prey on the inexperienced young gold-seekers.
Bret Harte was one of the first to use the literary possibilities of the "picturesque New South-West". While the rest were digging in the earth hoping for a "lucky strike", or plying criminal trades, Harte set about unearthing the rich human material around him. He was the first writer to deal ,with the sharp contrasts of human behaviour in "the Wild West", as that part of the country came to be known, and he succeeded in catching the flavour of a characteristic period of American history.
Life of Bret Harte
Francis Bret Harte was born in Albany, in the State of New York. His father was a teacher of Greek in a local college. Francis was often ill in his childhood and did not show much interest in any branch of learning. He said of himself that he had used the excuse of his poor health to escape regular study. But he liked to read and early in his boyhood he read the English classics and became interested in contemporary writers.
In 1856, after the death of his father, Bret Harte went to California. His mother, who was an energetic and enterprising woman, accompanied her son. We don't know whether Bret Harte went West because he too was drawn by the gold-rush, but we do know that he did not become a gold-miner because his biographers tell us that he was at one time a post-Plan, then a drug clerk, a school teacher, a compositor setting up type in a print-shop, and finally a journalist, but they never mention him being a miner.
Bret Harte did not hold jobs for long: he stopped being a drug clerk after he had nearly killed a patient by making a mistake in filling a prescription; the school he taught at was closed when the parents of most of the children left the town, the West being in a state of continuous Migration. He worked for a longer time at a small local newspaper The Northern Californian as a journalist.
A few years later Bret Harte went to San Francisco where he worked for the Golden Era, a magazine which printed some of his stories, and when in 1864 the Californian was founded, Bret Harte became its editor. Around these periodicals a group of young writers of humour collected, among them Mark Twain.
In the search of a new way to depict the West in its grotesque reality, some of the young writers began to parody the European sentimentalists, because sentimentalism and the rough spirit of the West were poles apart. Bret Harte wrote parody on the French writers Hugo, Dumas and others, making fun of their melodramatic and stilted style. He also wrote satirical parody on Dickens, though Dickens was one of his favourite writers. These were published in a book called the "Condensed Novels". The book shows Bret Harte's gift for satire which he unfortunately never developed in his later works.
In 1864 Bret Harte received the post of Secretary of the California Mint where coins were made under State authority. It was a post of great responsibility, but it gave him leisure to write.
In 1867 Bret Harte published a volume of verse. In 1868 a new magazine The Overland Monthly was founded, and Harte became one of the editors. All his best stories first appeared in this magazine: "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868), "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1869), "Miggles" and others.