Biography Essay

Bret Harte was the first Pacific slope writer to gain an international reputation for his work. As a deft observer of character and conditions, he introduced to a worldwide audience the picturesque life of mid-nineteenth-century northern California. Yet his best stories and sketches contain much more than local color. The spectacular settings, the accurate costumes and dialects, even the realistic depictions of character typesranging from aristocratic hidalgos to scheming women, whores, and bumptious Missourians—are finally subordinate to the questions of courage, cowardice, and moral ambiguity that fascinated Harte as a writer and plagued him as a man. These are also the questions that have occupied literature about the American West throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although Harte did not discover them first, he did address them with intelligence, insight, and wit during the four decades of his active writing career. As a writer...