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 concepts, and its national importance as a component in the American critical spectrum. His literary criticism, directly in his reviews for the Overland Monthly and indirectly through his burlesques of fiction in his two collections of "Condensed Novels," was important in stating a pragmatic western call for realistic details of "lowlife." His viewpoint helped to advance the local-color and realist fiction of the 1870s and 1880s, although that realism outgrew Harte 's limited sense of its broadened subject matter by the 1890s. Harte himself hardly advanced his writing beyond the local-color fiction of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," but other writers benefited from his critical position of advocating a fresh and descriptive literature...