SOURCE: Mitchell, Lee. “Bierstadt's Settings, Harte's Plots.” In Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West, edited by Michael Kowalewski, pp. 99-124. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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 America's Far West. Unlike anyone before, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) and Bret Harte (1836-1902) took the nation by storm, and yet in less than a decade, few Americans glanced at Bierstadt's grandiose landscapes or leafed through Harte's sentimental stories. Images that had recently captivated the imagination had come to seem either grossly inflated or baldly inaccurate, cloyingly mawkish, or simply banal. The fact that both painter and writer experienced such a meteoric rise and fall in reputation, at nearly the same time, raises the...