Francis Brett Hart (August 25, 1836 – May 5, 1902), known as Bret Harte ( ), 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.
Harte 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.
Early life Harte was born in 1836Some sources say he was born in 1837 or 1839. Even his gravestone has the wrong year, 1837. See also Bret Harte Birth Year Set as 1836, Berkeley Daily Gazette, August 15, 1936 in Albany, New York.Scharnhorst, Gary. Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000: 3. 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.Merwin, Henry Childs. The Life of Bret Harte, page 8
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.""Autumn Musings" is reported to have been published in the New York Sunday Atlas, according to Theodore Bryant Kingsbury, "Vanity of Earthly Things," Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), December 13, 1903, p. 14. The Atlas may have been one of the Albany newspapers using that title from 1843 to 1855.
Harte's 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, as a tutor and school teacher, then a printer's devil on The Northern Californian, and went on to reporting news, writing poems, and occasionally, acting editor. He left after three years, due to receiving lynching threats for writing an editorial about the 26 February 1860 Wiyot massacre.
Union 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.
The 1860 massacre by white settlers 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: [A] more shocking and revolting spectacle was never 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 gray hair. Infants scarce 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.
Among Harte's first literary efforts was a poem published in The Golden Era in 1857Scharnhorst, Gary. Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000: 6. and, in October of that same year, his first prose piece on "A Trip Up the Coast".Nissen, Axel. Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2000: 48–49. When he escaped to San Francisco in the spring of 1860, he was hired as editor of The Golden Era, 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. California journalist Bret Harte first wrote as "The Bohemian" in The Golden Era in 1861, with this persona taking part in many satirical doings. Ogden, Dunbar H.; Douglas McDermott; Robert Károly Sarlós Theatre West: Image and Impact, Rodopi, 1990, pp. 17–42. ISBN 90-5183-125-0 Harte described San Francisco as a sort of Bohemia of the West. 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".Tarnoff, Ben. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. New York: The Penguin Press, 2014: 28.
Harte married Anna Griswold on August 11, 1862, in San Rafael, California.Nissen, Axel. Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper. University Press of Mississippi, 2000: 64. From the start, the marriage was rocky. Some suggested that she was consumed 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.Tarnoff, Ben. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. New York: The Penguin Press, 2014: 59. 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.Tarnoff, Ben. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. New York: The Penguin Press, 2014: 149. 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.Tarnoff, Ben. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature. New York: The Penguin Press, 2014: 188. The poem became better known by its alternate title "The Heathen Chinee" after being republished in a Boston newspaper in 1871.Scott, David. China and the International System, 1840–1949: Power, Presence, and Perceptions in a Century of Humiliation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008: 60–61. 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.Scharnhorst, Gary. Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000: 146. The poem was a fictional representation of attacks on Chinese immigrants and Harte intended to the reader to sympathize with the victim, the character Ah Sin. Instead, readers identified with the attacker, the character William Nye. Harte later referred to the piece as "the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote."
Like "Plain Language from Truthful James", Harte's 1874 short story "Wan Lee, the Pagan" also sought to undermine stereotypes about Chinese immigrants and to portray white Americans as the true savages.
Move east 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".Scharnhorst, Gary (2001). "Introduction". In Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, p. xvi. New York: Penguin Books. . His popularity waned 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 him and his family. He 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".Scharnhorst, Gary. Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000: 133.
Some time between 1872 and 1881, Harte rented the Willows, a Morristown, New Jersey mansion then owned by Union general and author Joseph Warren Revere. With Harte's time in Morristown inspired him to write an 1877 historical romance novel, Thankful Blossom.