Project Gutenberg's Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte, by Bret Harte

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Title: Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte

Author: Bret Harte

Posting Date: December 11, 2008 [EBook #2507]
Release Date: February, 2000

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS ***

Produced by Donald Lainson

COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS

By Bret Harte

"Argonaut Edition" Of The Works Of Bret Harte, Vol. 8

P. F. Collier & Son

New York

Copyright 1882, 1896, And 1902

By Houghton, Mifflin & Company

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Although Bret Harte's name is identified with Californian life, it was
not till he was fifteen that the author of "Plain Language from Truthful
James" saw the country of his adoption. Francis Bret Harte, to give the
full name which he carried till he became famous, was born at Albany,
New York, August 25, 1839. He went with his widowed mother to
California in 1854, and was thrown as a young man into the hurly-burly
which he more than any other writer has made real to distant and later
people. He was by turns a miner, school-teacher, express messenger,
printer, and journalist. The types which live again in his pages are
thus not only what he observed, but what he himself impersonated in his
own experience.

He began trying his pen in The Golden Era of San Francisco, where he was
working as a compositor; and when The Californian, edited by Charles
Henry Webb, was started in 1864 as a literary newspaper, he was one of a
group of brilliant young fellows--Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard,
Webb himself, and Prentice Mulford--who gave at once a new interest in
California beside what mining and agriculture caused. Here in an early
number appeared "The Ballad of the Emeu," and he contributed many poems,
grave and gay, as well as prose in a great variety of form. At the same
time he was appointed Secretary of the United States Branch Mint at San
Francisco, holding the office till 1870.

But Bret Harte's great opportunity came when The Overland Monthly was
established in 1868 by Anton Roman. This magazine was the outgrowth of
the racy, exuberant literary spirit