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 Overland Monthly in 1868, Harte was instrumental in promoting the careers of an entire generation of western writers. A pioneering western local-colorist, he burst upon the national scene with the publication of a series of popular tales and poems set in the California mining camps and boomtowns of the Gold Rush that crystalized his reputation as a rising western literary star. Lured east by offers of wealth and prestige, he signed in 1871 what was then the most lucrative contract in the history of American letters. A prototype of the man of letters as a man of business, Harte learned through painful experience to gauge his market and trade on his name. Although he never fully realized the promise of his early Overland Monthly tales, he was for the rest of his life a steady writer of western fiction that enjoyed wider popularity in England and Europe than in the United States.
