San Francisco Public Library |
Journalist and
author Frances Bret Harte was the editor of San Francisco's successful
Overland Monthly when he published his story, "The Luck of the Roaring
Camp" which brought him instant and wide fame in the late 1860s. Luck was
the child of a camp prostitute raised with the help of altruistic miners
in Victorian society. Much of Harte's work features some kind of reprobate
who's redeemed by sacrifice and self denial. In 1870 his stories and his
respected work at the helm of the Overland Monthly earned him a then lucrative
$10,000 a year contract writing one poem or story per month for the Atlantic
Monthly. Harte left California but not before his work greatly influenced
local color fiction here and elsewhere. His work elevated and romanticized
Gold Rush denizens for a culture that was ready to listen. The same year,
1870, Harte wrote the poem, "Plain Language from Truthful Jim," aka "The
Heathen Chinee" which was easily exploited by racists for its unflattering
portrayal of a Chinese card shark and the pronouncement by its narrator
that "We are ruined by cheap Chinese labor." During and after his run with
the Atlantic Monthly, Harte's career took him to New York, Boston, Glasgow,
and Crefeld, Germany. Harte later lived in England where he wrote marginal
stories using familiar material. |