HARTE, (Francis) Bret(t)

Nationality: American. Born: Albany, New York, 25 August 1836. Education: Lived with his family in various cities in the northeast then in New York City after 1845. Educated in local schools to age 13. Family: Married Anna Griswold in 1862; four children. Career: Worked in a lawyer's office, then a merchant's counting room, New York; moved to Oakland, California, 1854; teacher, LaGrange; apothecary's clerk, Oakland; express-man in various California towns, 1854-55; private tutor, 1856; guard on Wells Fargo stagecoach, 1857; printer and reporter, Arcata Northern Californian, 1858-60. Moved to San Francisco. Typesetter, Golden Era, 1860-61; clerk, Surveyor General's office, 1861-63; secretary, U.S. branch mint, 1863-69; contributor and occasional acting editor, Californian, 1864-66; first editor, Overland Monthly, 1868-71. Lived in New Jersey and New York, 1871-78; went on lecture tours, 1872-74; tried unsuccessfully to establish Capitol magazine, 1878; U.S. commercial agent, Krefeld, Germany, 1878-80; U.S. Consul, Glasgow, 1880-85. Lived in London, 1885-1902. Died: 5 May 1902.

Publications

Collections

Writings. 20 vols., 1896-1914.

Representative Selections, edited by Joseph B. Harrison. 1941.

The Best Short Stories, edited by Robert N. Linscott. 1967.

Selected Stories and Sketches. 1995.

Short Stories

The Lost Galleon and Other Tales. 1867.

The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches. 1870; revised edition, 1871.

Stories of the Sierras and Other Sketches. 1872.

Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Sketches. 1873.

An Episode of Fiddletown and Other Sketches. 1873.

Tales of the Argonauts and Other Sketches. 1875.

Wan Lee, The Pagan and Other Sketches. 1876.

My Friend, The Tramp. 1877.

The Man on the Beach. 1878.

Jinny. 1878.

Drift from Two Shores. 1878; as The Hoodlum Bard and Other Stories, 1878.

An Heiress of Red Dog and Other Sketches. 1879.

The Twins of Table Mountain. 1879.

Jeff Briggs's Love Story and Other Sketches. 1880.

Flip and Other Stories. 1882.

On the Frontier. 1884.

California Stories. 1884.

The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales. 1889.

A Sappho of Green Springs and Other Tales. 1891.

Sally Dows, Etc. 1893.

A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories. 1894.

The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories. 1894.

Barker's Luck and Other Stories. 1896.

The Ancestors of Peter Atherly and Other Tales. 1897.

Tales of Trail and Town. 1898.

Stories in Light and Shadow. 1898.

Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories. 1899.

Trent's Trust and Other Stories. 1903.

Novels

Condensed Novels and Other Papers. 1867; revised edition, 1871.

The Little Drummer; or, The Christmas Gift That Came to Rupert: A Story for Children. 1872.

Idyls of the Foothills. 1874.

Gabriel Conroy. 1876.

Thankful Blossom: A Romance of the Jerseys 1779. 1877.

Thankful Blossom and Other Tales. 1877.

The Story of a Mine. 1877.

In the Carquinez Woods. 1883.

By Shore and Sedge. 1885.

Maruja. 1885.

Snow-Bound at Eagle's. 1886.

The Queen of the Pirate Isle. 1886.

A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready, and Devil's Ford. 1887.

The Crusade of the Excelsior. 1887.

A Phyllis of the Sierras, and A Drift from Redwood Camp. 1888.

The Argonauts of North Liberty. 1888.

Cressy. 1889.

Captain Jim's Friend, and The Argonauts of North Liberty. 1889.

A Waif of the Plains. 1890.

A Ward of the Golden Gate. 1890.

A First Family of Tasajara. 1891.

Colonel Starbottle's Client and Some Other People. 1892.

Susy: A Story of the Plains. 1893.

Clarence. 1895.

In a Hollow of the Hills. 1895.

Three Partners; or, The Big Strike on Heavy Tree Hill. 1897.

From Sand Hill to Pine. 1900.

Under the Redwoods. 1901.

Openings in the Old Trail. 1902; as On the Old Trail, 1902.

Condensed Novels: Second Series: New Burlesques. 1902.

Plays

Two Men of Sandy Bar, from his story "Mr. Thompson's Prodigal." 1876.

Ah Sin, with Mark Twain (produced 1877). Edited by FrederickAnderson, 1961.

Sue, with T. Edgar Pemberton, from the story "The Judgment of Bolinas Plain" by Harte (produced 1896). 1902; as Held Up (produced 1903).

Poetry

The Heathen Chinee. 1870.

Poems. 1871.

That Heathen Chinee and Other Poems. 1871.

East and West Poems. 1871.

Poetical Works. 1872; revised edition, 1896, 1902.

Echoes of the Foot-Hills. 1874.

Some Later Verses. 1898.

Unpublished Limericks and Cartoons. 1933.

Other

Complete Works. 1872.

Prose and Poetry. 2 vols., 1872.

Lectures, edited by Charles Meeker Kozlay. 1909.

Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writings, edited by Charles Meeker Kozlay. 19l4.

Sketches of the Sixties by Harte and Mark Twain from The Californian 1864-67. 1926; revised edition, 1927.

Letters, edited by Geoffrey Bret Harte. 1926.

San Francisco in 1866, Being Letters to the Springfield Republican, edited by George R. Stewart and Edwin S. Fussell. 1951.

Bret Harte's Gold Rush. 1997.

Selected Letters of Bret Harte. 1997.

Editor, Outcroppings, Being Selections of California Verse. 1865.

Editor, Poems, by Charles Warren Stoddard. 1867.

*

Bibliography:

in Bibliography of American Literature by Jacob Blanck, 1959; Harte: A Reference Guide by Linda D. Barnett, 1980; Bret Harte: A Bibliography by Gary Scharnhorst, 1995.

Critical Studies:

Harte, Argonaut and Exile by George R. Stewart, 1931; Mark Twain and Harte by Margaret Duckett, 1964; Harte: A Biography by Richard O'Connor, 1966; Harte, 1972, and Harte, Literary Critic, 1979, both by Patrick Morrow.

* * *

Although Bret Harte has often been scorned as the author of unrealistic and sentimental short stories such as "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," and "Tennessee's Partner," some literary historians have suggested that his influence on the short story has been significant. Arthur Hobson Quinn has argued that Harte taught nearly all American short-story writers some of the essentials of their art, and Fred Lewis Pattee has placed Harte second only to Washington Irving in his influence on the form.

Harte's short fiction represents a transition point between the romanticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe and the realism of Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, resting uneasily in that era of American literature known as the local color movement. Harte once said he aimed to be the Washington Irving of the Pacific coast. And indeed his stories are closely related to the folklore of a region, much as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" are. Harte, however, differs from Irving in that his characters derive not from folklore itself but rather from actuality; indeed, this grounding of the stuff of fable in the world of fact explains how local color formed the roots of the realistic movement. Harte is a realist in that he tries to create the illusion that the events in his stories could actually happen and that the characters are as-if-real, rather than that the events were derived from folklore, as they are in the stories of Irving, or that the characters are the figures of parable, as they are in the stories of Hawthorne.

This grounding of characters and events in a specific regional area creates the illusion of realism often attributed to Harte. For example, in his first story, "The Work on Red Mountain," later named "M'liss," Harte creates a character who seems to come alive with reality primarily because in her rebellion and individuality she stands out so extremely from those around her. But the creation of a character who is an individualist does not necessarily mean the creation of an individual character. In his invention of philosophical gamblers, virginal schoolmarms, and prostitutes with hearts of gold, Harte did not draw on preexisting stereotypes so much as he created them to become stereotypes of the pulp and b-movie western ever since.

Granted, Harte makes use of a crude sort of psychology, but by presenting burly and coarse-talking miners as gentle father-figures, hard and brittle gamblers as philosophical Hamlets, and gaudily painted prostitutes as self-sacrificing martyrs, Harte tried to show that beneath the surface of one's external persona lay unexamined depths when a crisis or a novel situation arose to stimulate them. The sentimentality that results from this simplistic psychology often constitutes the crucial turning point of Harte's stories; thus, it is the sentimentality of the gestures of Kentuck, Tennessee's Partner, and the gambler Oakhurst that remains with the reader.

It is the humor, however, that usually goes along with the pathos that critics have failed to note in Harte—a humor that creates ironic effects that make his stories more complex than they first appear and that has made them so influential on the development of the short story. Harte would have been happy to accept this as his major contribution, for he once singled out humor, originating in stories and anecdotes and orally transmitted in barrooms and country stories, as the factor that finally diminished the influence of English models on the form and created the first true American short story.

The topsy-turvy world of Bret Harte is primarily created by the comic intent of the point of view or voice of his stories. In her classic study of American humor Constance Rourke notes that Harte used the traditional forms of burlesque, sketch, yarn, episode, and particularly the monologue, "Its tone was often apparent even when the personal approach was submerged." This monologue humor is most obvious in what has been called Harte's best story, "Tennessee's Partner," for here the bipolarity of humor and pathos seems most obviously laid bare. The story, however, has not always been understood this way. Mark Twain's annotations on the story focus on the central problem, "Does the artist show a clear knowledge of human nature when he makes his hero welcome back a man who has committed against him that sin which neither the great nor the little ever forgive? & not only welcome him back but love him with the fondling love of a girl to the last, & then pine for the loss of him?"

The problem with Twain's reading of the story, and that of numerous readers since, is that he has not paid careful attention to the tone of the teller. After relating how Tennessee's partner went to San Francisco for a wife and was stopped in Stockton by a young waitress who broke at least two plates of toast over his head, the narrator says that he is well aware that "something more might be made of this episode, but I prefer to tell it as it was current at Sandy Bar—in the gulches and barrooms—where all sentiment was modified by a strong sense of humor." It is from this point of view—sentiment modified by humor—that the narrator tells the entire story. Tennessee's running off with his partner's wife and his trial and execution are related in the same flippant phrases and in the same tone as used to describe Tennessee's partner's somewhat hazardous wooing. Once the reader is willing to accept this barroom point of view, the story takes on a new and not so pathetic dimension. The narrator fully intends for this story to be not the occasion for tears but for sardonic laughter.

Still, it is Harte's sentimentality that has most appealed to popular readers and has most alienated the serious critical establishment. Wallace Stegner has summed up Harte's critical situation admirably, "The consensus on Harte is approximately what it was at the time of his death: that he was a skillful but not profound writer who make a lucky strike in subject matter and for a few heady months enjoyed a fabulous popularity."

—Charles E. May

See the essays on "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat."