Writer bret harte biography
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Bret Harte [1836-1902]
Bret Harte was a 19th century author and poet famous for his stories about California mining towns, and about the pioneering life in the California of his day. Harte was born in Albany, New York, as Francis Brett Hart. He was named after his great grand father Francis Brett, and his family name was then Hart. Harte clearly did not like the names he was born with, and later in life eliminated his first given name, Francis, changed his second given name to Bret from Brett, and changed his family name from Hart to Harte. I guess he just wanted to be different.
Harte moved to California in 1853, when he was only 17 years old. It is not clear if he was a young adventurer or whether he moved with his family. Harte initially lived in Union [now Arcata], California, where he served as assistant editor for the “Northern Californian”, a local newspaper. In 1860, a massacre occurred at Tutulwat, near Union, where between 80 and 200 native Americans were k
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Spartacus Educational
Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York in 1836. At 18 he moved to California where he worked as a prospector, a teacher and for Wells Fargo. In 1857 he began his journalistic career when he was employed bygd the Northern Californian. His support for Native Americans in the area was unpopular and after settlers were killed in 1860 he lost his job.
Harte moved to San Francisco where he worked for the Golden Era before becoming the editor of the Californian. One of those he employed on the journal was Mark Twain who later claimed Harte "trimmed and trained and schooled me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters."
In 1868 Harte became editor of the Overland Monthly when it was established in San Francisco in 1868. Over the next two years Harte established it as one of America's leading literary journals. Harte also published his own poems and stories in the journal, including the famous The Luck of Ro
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American writer and poet Bret Harte was born Francis Brett Harte in Albany, New York in 1836. Throughout his life, Harte also worked as a teacher, a miner, a journalist and an American diplomat in Europe. He is best remembered today for his iconic short stories, poems and articles about the California Gold Rush of the mid-19th century.
Although his formal education was sporadic and ended for good when he was only thirteen, Harte read and wrote from a young age. The earliest record of his published work cites a satirical poem called Autumn Musings, written when he was just eleven years old and published in the New York Sunday Atlas. After the death of his schoolteacher father in 1853, Harte’s family moved to Oakland, California where his mother had remarried (to Col. Andrew Williams, a future mayor of Oakland). Harte took up a series of diverse occupations before settling into a life-long career in letters. Following several years of teaching and working as a miner further a