biography
| name: |
Harte, Bret
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| |
pseudonym of Francis Brett Hart
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1836–1902)
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| biography:
| Writer and consular official, born in Albany, New York, USA. Moving to California at age 18, he worked at various jobs before becoming a journalist. He became an official of the US Mint in San Francisco (1863–70) but worked at his own writing and co-edited the Overland Monthly (1868–70), for which he commissioned some articles by Mark Twain. Harte's stories and poems on Western themes helped launch the ‘local color’ movement and he achieved a meteoric national celebrity status with his collection of stories, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870). He moved to the East to be part of the literary world, but his reputation soon faded and he became US consul in Germany (1878–80) and at Glasgow (1880–5). Settling in London for the rest of his life, he continued to write short stories and mixed with the literati, but he never again knew the success of his San Francisco days. |
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