SOURCE: Scharnhorst, Gary. “The Overland Monthly: From ‘The Luck’ to ‘The Prodigal.’” In Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West, pp. 37-69. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Scharnhorst surveys the stories by Harte that were published in The Overland Monthly.

From the start, Harte and Roman had very different ideas about what the magazine should be. The publisher wanted the Overland Monthly to promote “the material development of this Coast,” and according to its subtitle the magazine was “devoted to the development of the country.” He feared with good reason that Harte—who basked in the esteem of the San Francisco literary coterie—“would be likely to lean too much toward the purely literary articles.” On his part, as Roman reminisced thirty years later, Harte “entertained serious doubts of the success of such an enterprise,” much as he had questioned the commercial viability of...