Bret Harte

Francis Brett Hart was born in Albany, New York, in 1836, and arrived in California as a teenager just as the Gold Rush was changing the state faster than anyone could describe it. He worked as a miner, messenger, schoolteacher and journalist before finding the subject that made his name: the camps, river towns and rough settlements where people invented new rules because the old ones had not yet caught up.

As editor of the Overland Monthly in San Francisco, Harte published writers who helped make a regional literature and wrote stories of his own in a compressed, theatrical vernacular. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” both from 1868, made him famous far beyond California. Their miners, gamblers and fugitives were often romanticised, but Harte also gave them moral weight at a time when polite American fiction rarely looked in their direction.

Success pulled him east and then to Europe. He spent his final years as a United States consul in Germany and Britain, writing steadily while the California persona that made him famous became a burden he could not entirely escape. He died in London in 1902.