Bret Harte

Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York in 1836. By age 13, he was working full-time to support his family and was no longer attending school. He eventually moved to California, where he worked his way through a series of unrelated and odd jobs, including a gold prospector, drugstore clerk, schoolteacher, and stagecoach guard. After working in the printing business for a time, he turned to writing, and in 1868, he was appointed editor of a new regional magazine called the Overland Monthly. It was in this magazine that Harte published “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” two of his best-known short stories. After landing a lucrative contract with The Atlantic Monthly, Harte moved to the East Coast and was immediately welcomed into the literary scenes of Boston and New York. However, Harte’s fame soon became debilitating, and he found it extremely difficult to come up with new content. After losing his writing contract because of his poor output, Harte worked as a U.S. commercial agent in Germany and then as a U.S. consul in Scotland. In 1885, he moved to London, where he spent the remainder of his life. He died of throat cancer in 1902.