Bret Harte

Born in Albany, New York, in 1836, Bret Harte became one of the first writers to win wide attention for stories set in the American West. After moving to California as a teenager, he worked in a string of jobs, including mining-camp work, teaching, and journalism, experiences that gave him material for the frontier settings and characters that made him famous.

His breakthrough came with stories such as The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat, along with poems and sketches that captured Gold Rush California for readers in the eastern United States and abroad. He is often linked with local-color fiction because he wrote so memorably about regional speech, manners, and landscapes.

Harte’s career later took him into magazine editing, lecturing, and diplomatic work, and he spent much of his final years in Europe. He died in Camberley, England, in 1902, but his name remains closely tied to the myth, comedy, and hardship of the nineteenth-century American frontier.