Harte, Francis Bret
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Francis Bret (1839-1902), a noted American writer. He was born at Albany, New York , August 25, 1839, and died at Aldershot, England, May 5, 1902. During the gold excitement of 1854 he went to California. He taught school at Sonora and spent his small savings in mining, in which, however, he failed utterly. In 1857 he found work as a compositor in the office of the San Francisco Golden Era. Short sketches written for that paper began to attract attention. In 1864 he obtained an appointment in the branch mint at San Francisco. Four years later he was invited to become editor of the Overland Monthly. The Luck of Roaring Camp appeared in in its pages and made him famous. In 1871 he returned to New York City and wrote regularly for the Atlantic Monthly. In 1878 he was appointed consul at Crefeld, Germany, and two years later he was transferred to the consulate of Glasgow, Scotland. In 1885 he settled at London, where he continued to write stories of Western life. He was the first American writer to seize upon the picturesque features of California. Miners, stage drivers, gamblers, road agents, and boarding-house keepers, the mountains, gulches, torrents, fords, and dust of California, and the shifting scenes of mining camps, were introduced into literature for the first time. Some of his celebrated short stories are The Outcasts of Poker Flat, The Twins of Table Mountain , M'liss, and A Protege of Jack Hamlin's. Among his longer stories and novels are Gabriel Conroy, Snowbound at Eagle's, Colonel Star-bottle's Client, etc. He wrote also several volumes of verse, including Echoes of the Foothills. Ah Sin, the heathen Chinee, "with the smile that was child-like and bland," is one of his creations. Opinions of Harte's work vary. His writings deal necessarily with vice. The most of his characters, however, have a touch of human nature, ascribed by some to the sweetness and charity of the writer's nature, and by others to a propensity on his part to surround the daring and the picturesque with a sort of halo. His future is far from certain, but he will never be classed among the writers of yellow backed literature.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's hedged in 1910 that "his future is far from certain," and the century since has largely answered the question: Harte is read now not as a major artist but as the founder of American local-colour fiction, whose few 1868-70 stories — "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" — remain anthologised while the later novels and the verse have gone almost entirely out of print. Modern biographers also correct the birth date given here: he was probably born in 1836, not 1839, Harte himself having shaved years off his age. Aiton's cheerfully quotes "Ah Sin, the heathen Chinee"; that poem, properly "Plain Language from Truthful James" (1870), is now taught chiefly as evidence of anti-Chinese feeling in the West, though scholars note Harte wrote it meaning to mock the white miners' prejudice and was dismayed when it became a racist catchphrase. He died at Camberley in Surrey, near Aldershot, on 5 May 1902, and is buried at Frimley.
Written for this edition, 2026.