Francis Brett Harte, as he was christened, was born to Henry Harte and Elizabeth Ostrander Harte at Albany, New York, on 25 August 1836. There were two older children, Eliza, born in 1831, and Henry, born in 1835. A fourth, Margaret, would be born in 1838. Henry Harte operated a private school in the modest family home on Columbia Street. However, the financial panic of 1837 forced the school to close, and the Hartes were plunged into serious financial difficulty. For the next eight years they moved from town to town, setting up a household wherever Henry could find work as a teacher. The lack of permanence, and the anxiety about money and employment, must have been hard on young Frank. He was a quiet, withdrawn child, ill much of the time, who soon took refuge in books. At six, he was reading Shakespeare. By the time he was ten, he had familiarized himself with most of the major British novelists, but Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, which he read at about this time in a translation from the French, remained his favorite novel throughout his life.
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