Bret Harte

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Bret Harte Signature of Bret Harte.jpg

Francis Bret Harte (born August 25, 1836 in Albany , New York , † May 5, 1902 in Camberley , Great Britain ) was an American writer .

Life

Francis Bret Harte was born as the son of the Dutch-born teacher Henry Philip Harte and his wife Elizabeth Rebecca nee. Ostrander born. The father, raised in the spirit of the Dutch Reformed Church, had studied but was unable to obtain a diploma because of the tuition fees owed. The mother came from an educated family and was a member of the Episcopal Church . After his father's early death in 1845, the family moved to New York, where Harte worked in a law firm and for a pharmacist. At the age of ten or eleven he began to process his brother's experiences in the Mexican-American War in the form of little poems . In 1854 he and his sister Margaret followed their mother to California , where she had remarried. Bret initially earned his living in a variety of jobs. So he worked as a pharmacy employee, school and private teacher and express delivery, but also as a printer for the Northern Californian , where he could occasionally print his own poems. The many activities led him to develop a keen sense of the different characters that made up the new population of the American West.

The extent to which he also worked in the Californian mines, which play an important role in his literary work, has not been historically proven. In 1857 he published his first poem; The Valentine appeared in the weekly Golden Era . In the same year he moved to Uniontown for three years , where he worked as a private tutor, printing assistant and editorial assistant for the Northern Californian . After he had publicly protested against the massacre of the Wiyot Indians in 1860 , he was threatened with death, lost his job and returned to San Francisco , where he was employed as a typesetter and author of the Golden Era . His novella Mliss appeared at the end of 1860 and was a resounding success. In the same year he first used the name Bret Harte , by which he is commonly known today. On August 11, 1862, meanwhile working as an employee of the state land surveying, he married Anna Griswold in San Rafael (California) . In 1864 he changed his profession again when he accepted a job with the state mint in San Francisco. Also in 1864 he met Mark Twain for the first time , whom he supported as an aspiring writer.

In the following years he wrote articles for Charles Henry Webb's weekly newspaper The Californian as a typical representative of the local color fiction that flourished after the Civil War , which represented typical features of certain regions with great realism in their works . Harte was always concerned about the treatment of minorities, which at one point even cost him his job, and remained skeptical of the social impact of railroad construction in the western United States. In July 1868 he founded the monthly newspaper Overland Monthly , whose editor he was. In August of the same year he published - initially anonymously - "The Luck of Roaring Camp" , which forms the core of his literary work with the short story The Outcasts of Poker Flat published in January of the following year . Both stories, which take place in the Californian gold rush milieu of the early 1850s, form the starting point for Californian local color literature. After he left California in 1871, at the height of his career as the best-known and highest-paid author in the USA , to write for the leading literary newspaper in the USA, the Atlantic Monthly , interest soon ebbed away , especially on the East Coast for his works Harte, who was never able to build on his successes again.

The University of California at Berkeley offered him a professorship, which he declined. When neither his only novel , Gabriel Conroy , nor the play Ah Sin , which was written in collaboration with Mark Twain, achieved the desired success with the public, Harte decided to turn his back on his family and his homeland. In 1878 he went to Krefeld as a US consul , where he worked as a sales representative. During this time he lived mainly in Düsseldorf , where he also described the carnival there in Views from a German Spion . In 1880 he moved to Glasgow as US consul for five years . Relieved of his post in 1885, he moved to London , where he spent the rest of his life as an unsuccessful writer. His wife and two children followed him, but there was no reconciliation. In 1898 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

He developed throat cancer and died on May 5, 1902, at the age of 65 in Camberley, Surrey. Many of his stories have been translated into numerous languages, including Russian. When Stalin read the stories of the California gold rush in 1927, he allegedly gave orders to restart the Siberian gold mines, which helped the Soviet Union weather the crisis that followed.

Works

  • Mliss (1860)
  • The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868)
  • The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1869)
  • The Heathen Chinee (1870)
  • Tales of the Argonauts (1875)
  • Gabriel Conroy (1876)
  • Ah Sin (1877)
  • published in German: Californian stories ; Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar, 1986; ISBN 9783351001186

Film adaptations

literature

  • Linda Diz Barnett: Bret Harte. A reference guide. GK Hall, Boston 1980. (= A Reference publication in literature) ISBN 0-8161-8197-7
  • Margaret Duckett: Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Univ. of Oklahoma Pr., Norman 1964.
  • Bertel Haferkamp: The Child in Anglo-American Literature. From Bret Harte to William Golding. Gilles et al. Francke, Duisburg 1985. (= Duisburger Studien; 11) ISBN 3-921104-96-3
  • Axel Nissen: Bret Harte. Prince and pauper. Univ. Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Miss. 2000. ISBN 1-578-06253-5
  • Gary Scharnhorst: Bret Harte. Twayne et al. a., New York 1992. (= Twayne's United States authors series; 600) ISBN 0-8057-7648-6
  • Gary Scharnhorst: Bret Harte. A bibliography. Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md. U. a. 1995. (= The Scarecrow author bibliographies; 95) ISBN 0-8108-3067-1

Web links

Commons : Bret Harte  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Bret Harte  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Members: Bret Harte. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 2, 2019 .
  2. ↑ K. Coudenhove-Kallergis, afterword to: Bret Harte, Kalifornische Erzählungen , Zurich 1968, p. 461 f.
personal data
SURNAME Hard, Bret
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Harte, Francis Bret (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1836
PLACE OF BIRTH Albany , New York
DATE OF DEATH May 5, 1902
Place of death Camberley , UK