Background
Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, on August 25, 1836. He was named Francis Brett Hart after his great-grandfather, Francis Brett. When he was young his father, Henry, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte.
Portrait of Bret Harte – oil painting by John Pettie (1884).
Bret Harte's gravestone in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Frimley, Surrey, England
Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, on August 25, 1836. He was named Francis Brett Hart after his great-grandfather, Francis Brett. When he was young his father, Henry, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte.
His formal schooling ended when he was 13, in 1849.
An avid reader as a boy, Harte published his first work at age 11, a satirical poem titled "Autumn Musings", now lost. Rather than attracting praise, the poem garnered ridicule from his family.
Harte moved to California in 1853,later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist. He guarded treasure boxes on stagecoaches for a few months, then gave it up to become the schoolmaster at a school near Sonora.
He serving as assistant editor for the Northern Californian. Harte quit his job and moved to San Francisco.
Among Harte's first literary efforts, a poem was published in The Golden Era in 1857, and, in October of that same year, his first prose piece on "A Trip Up the Coast".
He was hired as editor of The Golden Era in the spring of 1860, which he attempted to make into a more literary publication. Among his writings were parodies and satires of other writers, including The Stolen Cigar-Case featuring ace detective "Hemlock Jones", which Ellery Queen praised as "probably the best parody of Sherlock Holmes ever written".
He was determined to pursue his literary career and traveled back East with his family in 1871 to New York and eventually to Boston where he contracted with the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly for an annual salary of $10,000. His popularity waned, however, and by the end of 1872 he was without a publishing contract and increasingly desperate. He spent the next few years struggling to publish new work or republish old, and delivering lectures about the gold rush. The winter of 1877-1878 was particularly hard for Harte and his family. Harte accepted the position of United States Consul in the town of Krefeld, Germany in May 1878.
In 1885, he settled in London. Throughout his time in Europe, he regularly wrote to his wife and children and sent monthly financial contributions. He declined, however, to invite them to join him, nor did he return to the United States to visit them. His excuses were usually related to money. During the 24 years that he spent in Europe, he never abandoned writing and maintained a prodigious output of stories that retained the freshness of his earlier work.
He died in Camberley, England in 1902 of throat cancer, and is buried at Frimley.
(Bret Harte was on the West Coast by the 1860s, placing hi...)
Member of the Bohemian Club
Quotes from others about the person
Andrew Carnegie praised Harte as uniquely American: "A whispering pine of the Sierras transplanted to Fifth Avenue! How could it grow? Although it shows some faint signs of life, how sickly are the leaves! As for fruit, there is none. America had in Bret Harte its most distinctively national poet."
Harte married Anna Griswold on August 11, 1862 in San Rafael, California. From the start, the marriage was rocky. Some suggested that she was handicapped by extreme jealousy, while early Harte biographer Henry C. Merwin privately concluded that she was "almost impossible to live with". His wife Anna (née Griswold) Harte died on August 2, 1920. The couple lived together only 16 of the 40 years that they were married.