Bret Harte

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, and even beyond, the cultural identity of the United States was dominated by the East Coast. Hawthorne was part (albeit a detached part) of the Boston literary society which constituted the most powerful cultural grouping. Irving was a New York writer whose chosen literary territory was the Hudson valley, while Melville was born in New York City, settled for a time in Massachusetts and then moved again in 1863 to New York City, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Poe spent most of his early life in Richmond, Virginia, adopted something of the style and social aspirations of a Southern gentleman, and later lived in Philadelphia and New York City.

But from the middle decades of the century the West, hitherto mainly populated by Native Americans and immigrant Spanish colonialists, began to be opened up by Americans of English origin. In 1848 gold was discovered in California, and the gold-rush began that increased the non-Native population of California from around 14,000 to over 250,000 by 1852. In 1860, a young staff writer on the San Francisco newspaper the Golden Era, Francis Brett Hart, using his newly adopted nom de plume Bret Harte, published his first short story, ‘The Work on Red Mountain’ (later entitled ‘Mliss’). In 1864 he became a contributor and occasional editor of the weekly Californian, and in 1868 the founding editor of the Overland Monthly. In that year he published his most famous story.