Harte, Bret. (1836 - 1902).
L i f e
- two years the chief editor of the Overland Monthly in San Francisco (the magazine was a platform for new writers, including M. Twain)
- contributor for the Atlantic Monthly in Boston
W o r k
- wrote regionalist and local colour tall tales, short stories, and poems
- combined realism and sentiment
- introduced fresh topics and settings: especially the Wild West mining town in California (own experience)
- used dialect in the passages involving dialogue
- established new types of characters: roughs from outside x but: sentimentally with something good inside
P o e t r y :
The Lost Galeon (1867)
“The Heathen Chinee”:
- his most famous poem
P r o s e :
Condensed Novels (1867):
- a prose satire parodying especially the contemporary English literary forms
The Luck of the Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870):
= a collection of short stories
“The Outcasts of Poker Flat”
“Tennessee’s Partner”
Quote
"I do not think that we ever knew his real name. Our ignorance of it certainly never gave us any social inconvenience, for at Sandy Bar in 1854 most men were christened anew. Sometimes these appellatives were derived from some distinctiveness of dress, as in the case of 'Dungaree Jack'; or from some peculiarity of habit, as shown in 'Saleratus Bill', so called from an undue proportion of that chemical in his daily bread; or from some unlucky slip, as exhibited in 'The Iron Pirate', a mild, inoffensive man, who earned that baleful title by his unfortunate mispronunciation of the term 'iron pyrites'".
The opening of "Tennessee's Partner".
Basics
(Painting: John Pettie. 1884. Source: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Born Francis Brett Hart. Changed his name to (Francis) Bret Harte. (1836 - 1902). American. -
Work
Novelist. Short story writer. Poet. Author of stories about pioneering California life. -
Genres
Romanticism. Regionalism.
Literature
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. London: Penguin, 1991.
Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1994.
McQuade, Donald, gen.ed. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper & Collins, 1996.
Ruland, Richard, Malcolm Bradbury. Od puritanismu k postmodernismu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
Vančura, Zdeněk, ed. Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké. Praha: Odeon, 1979.