Bret Harte

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For the census-designated place, see Bret Harte, California.

Portrait of Bret Harte - oil painting by John Pettie (1884)^[1]

Bret Harte (August 25, 1836^[2] – May 6, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.

1 Life and career
2 Criticism
3 Dramatic and musical adaptations of Harte's work
4 Other works
5 Legacy
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Life and career

He was born in Albany, New York, as Francis Brett Hart. He was named after his great-grandfather Francis Brett, and his family name was Hart. When he was young his father changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte. Later, Francis preferred to be known by his middle name, but he spelled it with only one "t", becoming Bret Harte.

He moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist. He spent part of his life in the northern California coast town now known as Arcata, then just a mining camp on Humboldt Bay.

His first literary efforts, including poetry and prose, appeared in The Californian, an early literary journal edited by Charles Henry Webb. In 1868 he became editor of The Overland Monthly, another new literary magazine, but this one more in tune with the pioneering spirit of excitement in California. His story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp," appeared in the magazine's second edition, propelling Harte to nationwide fame.

When word of Dickens' death reached Bret Harte in July of 1870, he immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming publication of his Overland Monthly for twenty-four hours, so that he could compose the poetic tribute, Dickens in Camp. This work is considered by many of Harte's admirers as his masterpiece of verse, for its evident sincerity, the depth of feeling it displays, and the unusual quality of its poetic expression.

Bret Harte in 1868^[3]

Bret Harte's gravestone in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Frimley, Surrey, England

Inscription on gravestone

Determined to pursue his literary career, in 1871 he and his family traveled back East, to New York and eventually to Boston, where he contracted with a publisher for an annual salary of $10,000, "an unprecedented sum at the time."^[4] His popularity waned, however, 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), delivering lectures about the gold rush, and even selling an advertising jingle to a soap company.

“

A whispering pine of the Sierras transplanted to Fifth Avenue! How could it grow? Although it shows some faint signs of life, how sickly are the leaves! As for fruit, there is none. America had in Bret Harte its most distinctively national poet.

”

Andrew Carnegie, Round the World^[5]

In 1878 Harte was appointed to the position of United States Consul in the town of Krefeld, Germany and then to Glasgow in 1880. In 1885 he settled in London. During the thirty years he spent in Europe, he never abandoned writing, and maintained a prodigious output of stories that retained the freshness of his earlier work. He died in England in 1902 of throat cancer and is buried at Frimley. In 1987 he appeared on a $5 U.S. Postage stamp, as part of the "Great Americans" Series of issues.

[edit] Criticism

Writing in his autobiography four years after Harte's death, Mark Twain famously insults Harte, characterizing him and his writing as insincere. He criticizes the miners' dialect, claiming it never existed outside of the story ("The Luck of Roaring Camp"). Twain reserves his most damning statements for Harte's personal life, especially after Harte left the West, including his habitual borrowing of money from his friends with no intent to repay, his haughty attitude and his financial abandonment of his wife and children.

[edit] Dramatic and musical adaptations of Harte's work

Several film versions of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" have been made, including one in 1937 with Preston Foster and another in 1952 with Dale Robertson. Tennessee's Partner (1955) with John Payne and Ronald Reagan was based on a story of the same name. Paddy Chayefsky's treatment of the film version of Paint Your Wagon seems to borrow from "Tennessee's Partner": two close friends—one named "Pardner"—share the same woman. The spaghetti western Four of the Apocalypse is based on "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "The Luck of Roaring Camp".
Operas based on "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" include those by Samuel Adler [2] and by Stanford Beckler. [3]

[edit] Other works

Plain Language from Truthful James, known also as The Heathen Chinee, was a satire of racial prejudice in northern California, but was embraced by the American public as a mockery of Chinese immigrants, and shaped anti-Chinese sentiment more than any other work at the time.^[6]

The Society upon the Stanislaus is a tragicomic poem, like Plain Language from Truthful James set in the northern California mining camps, and told by the same narrator, "Truthful James".

The Beulah song "Ballad of the Lonely Argonaut" references "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "Outcasts of Poker Flat" and asks, "How does it feel to roam this land like Harte and Twain did?"

[edit] Legacy

Bret Harte Elementary School in Long Beach, California.
Bret Harte Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois.
Bret Harte Middle School
Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland and Hayward was named after him.
Bret Harte High School in Altaville, California is named after him and celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2005
Bret Harte Elementary in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
A community called The Shores of Poker Flat, California claims to have been the location of Poker Flat, although it is usually accepted that the story takes place further north.
Bret Harte Road in Frimley (the town in which Harte was buried) was named after him.
Bret Harte Alley in Arcata, California, is named after him.
Twain Harte is a census-designated place (CDP) in Tuolumne County, California, United States. The population was 2,586 at the 2000 census. The name Twain Harte is derived from the last names of two famous authors who lived in California, Mark Twain and Bret Harte.

[edit] Notes

^ Gerten-Jackson, Carol. CGFA - John Pettie: Portrait of Bret Harte. CGFA. Retrieved on 2006-06-07.
^ Some sources say he was born in 1837. Even his gravestone has the wrong year 1837.
^ O'Day, E. Clarence (August 1920). "Stories From The Files-Narrative Which Unexpectedly Made Bret Harte a Literary Celebrity". Overland Monthly LXXV (2).
^ Scharnhorst, Gary (2001). "Introduction". In Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, p. xvi. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-043917-X.
^ Andrew Carnegie, Round the World, The Project Gutenberg EBook [1]
^ Scharnhorst, Gary. "Ways That Are Dark": Appropriations of Bret Harte's "Plain Language from Truthful James". Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Dec., 1996), pp. 377-399.