Bret Harte

Bret Harte (1836-1902) was an American poet, journalist, and fiction writer closely associated with the literary West. After moving to California as a young man, he drew on mining camps, frontier settlements, and local speech in stories such as "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," and "Tennessee's Partner." His fiction helped establish a popular version of the Western short story, mixing humour, sentiment, rough manners, and sudden moral feeling. Harte later lived in the eastern United States and Europe, but his reputation remained tied to the California settings that made him famous.