Bret Harte was an American short-story writer and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern US to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been the works most often reprinted, adapted, and admired. We offer now some samples of his diversity in a collection of his short stories.
“The Luck of Roaring Camp”
“The Outcasts of Poker Flats”
“Tennessee’s Partner”
“The Idyl of Red Gulch”
“Brown of Calaveras”
“Muck-A-Muck”
“The Ninety-Nine Guardsmen”
“Mr. Midshipman Breezy”
“John Jenkins”
“The Hoodlum Band”
“The Legend of Monte Del Diablo”
“The Legend of Devil’s Point”
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Bret Harte (1836–1902) was born in Albany, New York, and was raised in New York City. He had no formal education, but he inherited a love for books. Harte wrote for the San Franciscan Golden Era paper. There he published his first condensed novels, which were brilliant parodies of the works of well-known authors, such as Dickens and Cooper. Later, he became clerk in the US branch mint. This job gave Harte time to also work for the Overland Monthly, where he published his world-famous “Luck of the Roaring Camp” and commissioned Mark Twain to write weekly articles. In 1871, Harte was hired by the Atlantic Monthly for $10,000 to write twelve stories a year, which was the highest figure paid to an American writer at the time.
John Rayburn (1927–2024) was a veteran of sixty-two years in broadcasting. He served as a news and sports anchor and show host, and his television newscast achieved the largest share-of-audience figures of any major-market television newscast in the nation. He was a member of the Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame. His network credits include reports and/or appearances on The Today Show, Huntley-Brinkley News, Walter Cronkite News, NBC Monitor, NBC News on the Hour, and others. He recorded dozens of books for the National Library Service and narrated innumerable radio and television recordings.