Bret Harte
Born August 25, 1836Albany, New York
Died May 5, 1902Camberley, England
Writer and editor
Bret Harte. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.
"The only sure thing abo...
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Biography EssayBret Harte was the first Pacific slope writer to gain an international reputation for his work. As a deft observer of character and conditions, he introduced to a worldwide audience the...
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Francis Brett Harte (1837-1902), known as Bret Harte, an American poet and fiction writer who specialized in local color and regional stories, set the fashion in fiction for a number of writers in the...
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Bret Harte was the first Pacific slope writer to gain an international reputation for his work. As a deft observer of character and conditions, he introduced to a worldwide audience the picturesque li...
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Bret Harte was one of the most important image makers of the Pacific slope during and immediately after the American Civil War. As such, he was important in establishing the image of the West, its co...
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From 1869, the year the final spike was driven into the transcontinental railroad, to 1876, when George Custer died at the Little Big Horn and the United States celebrated its centennial, Bret Harte e...
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A growling California grizzly bear crossing railroad tracks was the emblem for the Overland Monthly magazine that appeared 1 July 1868 on San Francisco's newsstands. The editor, Bret Harte , had adde...
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More than any other American writer, Bret Harte discovered the "literary West," or so Henry Seidel Canby declared in the Saturday Review of Literature for 17 April 1926. As founding editor of the Over...
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In the following essay, Kolb regards Harte as a humorist and local colorist.
In that corner of American literary history reserved for half-true maxims—Dreiser lacked everything but genius, H...
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In the following essay, Scharnhorst explores the reasons for Harte's virtual disappearance from modern critical studies.
In the midst of a literary reformation whose most radical protestants...
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In the following essay, Mitchell finds parallels between the careers of Harte and the painter Albert Bierstadt.
In the mid-1860s, a painter and a writer burst into fame as the premier artists of Am...
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In the following excerpt, Nissen reevaluates the later stages of Harte's literary career.
I see no limit to the future in art of a country which has already given us Emerson, that master of ...
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In the following essay, Nissen determines the influence of Catherine E. Beecher's The American Woman's Home on Harte's “The Luck of Roaring Camp.”
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More than any...
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In the following essay, Stevens traces the development of Harte's treatment of gender and sexuality in his short fiction.
By almost all accounts, Bret Harte must be considered a progenitor o...
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In the following essay, Floyd considers the position of Harte and Mary Hallock Foote within the literary tradition of the American West.
The category “Western writing” is a slippery o...
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In the following essay, Scharnhorst surveys the stories by Harte that were published in The Overland Monthly.
From the start, Harte and Roman had very different ideas about what the magazine should...
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In the following essay, Thomas focuses on the dynamic power of erotic desire in Bret Harte's short fiction.
Reflecting dolefully on his life and times, Henry Adams seized upon the Virgin Mar...
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FAYETTEVILLE, Ga. _ Pro wrestler Chris Benoit strangled his wife, suffocated his 7-year-old son and placed a Bible next to their bodies before hanging himself with the pulley of a weightlifting mac...
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Harte, Bret
Francis Brett Harte
(Francis) Bret(t) Harte
Critical Essay by Harold H. Kolb, Jr.
Benoit strangled wife, smothered son
