{"product_id":"2940014501125","title":"Complete Poetical Works","description":"BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH\u003cbr\u003eAlthough Bret Harte's name is identified with Californian life, it was\u003cbr\u003enot till he was fifteen that the author of \"Plain Language from\u003cbr\u003eTruthful\u003cbr\u003eJames\" saw the country of his adoption. Francis Bret Harte, to give\u003cbr\u003ethe\u003cbr\u003efull name which he carried till he became famous, was born at Albany,\u003cbr\u003eNew York, August 25, 1839. He went with his widowed mother to\u003cbr\u003eCalifornia in 1854, and was thrown as a young man into the hurly-burly\u003cbr\u003ewhich he more than any other writer has made real to distant and later\u003cbr\u003epeople. He was by turns a miner, school-teacher, express messenger,\u003cbr\u003eprinter, and journalist. The types which live again in his pages are\u003cbr\u003ethus not only what he observed, but what he himself impersonated in\u003cbr\u003ehis\u003cbr\u003eown experience.\u003cbr\u003eHe began trying his pen in The Golden Era of San Francisco, where he\u003cbr\u003ewas\u003cbr\u003eworking as a compositor; and when The Californian, edited by Charles\u003cbr\u003eHenry Webb, was started in 1864 as a literary newspaper, he was one of\u003cbr\u003ea\u003cbr\u003egroup of brilliant young fellows--Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard,\u003cbr\u003eWebb himself, and Prentice Mulford--who gave at once a new interest in\u003cbr\u003eCalifornia beside what mining and agriculture caused. Here in an\u003cbr\u003eearly\u003cbr\u003enumber appeared \"The Ballad of the Emeu,\" and he contributed many\u003cbr\u003epoems,\u003cbr\u003egrave and gay, as well as prose in a great variety of form. At the\u003cbr\u003esame\u003cbr\u003etime he was appointed Secretary of the United States Branch Mint at\u003cbr\u003eSan\u003cbr\u003ePage 1\u003cbr\u003eComplete Poetical Works\u003cbr\u003eFrancisco, holding the office till 1870.\u003cbr\u003eBut Bret Harte's great opportunity came when The Overland Monthly was\u003cbr\u003eestablished in 1868 by Anton Roman. This magazine was the outgrowth\u003cbr\u003eof\u003cbr\u003ethe racy, exuberant literary spirit which had already found free\u003cbr\u003eexpression in the journals named. An eager ambition to lift all the\u003cbr\u003enew\u003cbr\u003elife of the Pacific into a recognized place in the world of letters\u003cbr\u003emade\u003cbr\u003ethe young men we have named put their wits together in a monthly\u003cbr\u003emagazine which should rival the Atlantic in Boston and Blackwood in\u003cbr\u003eEdinburgh. The name was easily had, and for a sign manual on the\u003cbr\u003ecover\u003cbr\u003esome one drew a grizzly bear, that formidable exemplar of Californian\u003cbr\u003ewildness. But the design did not quite satisfy, until Bret Harte,\u003cbr\u003ewith\u003cbr\u003ea felicitous stroke, drew two parallel lines just before the feet of\u003cbr\u003ethe\u003cbr\u003ehalting brute. Now it was the grizzly of the wilderness drawing back\u003cbr\u003ebefore the railway of civilization, and the picture was complete as an\u003cbr\u003eemblem.\u003cbr\u003eBret Harte became, by the common urgency of his companions, the first\u003cbr\u003eeditor of the Overland, and at once his own tales and poems began, and\u003cbr\u003ein the second number appeared \"The Luck of Roaring Camp,\" which\u003cbr\u003einstantly brought him wide fame. In a few months he found himself\u003cbr\u003ebesought for poems and articles, sketches and stories, in influential\u003cbr\u003emagazines, and in 1871 he turned away from the Pacific coast, and took\u003cbr\u003eup his residence, first in New York, afterward in Boston.\u003cbr\u003e\"No one,\" says his old friend, Mr. Stoddard, \"who knows Mr. Harte, and\u003cbr\u003eknew the California of his day, wonders that he left it as he did.\u003cbr\u003eEastern editors were crying for his work. Cities vied with one\u003cbr\u003eanother\u003cbr\u003ein the offer of tempting bait. When he turned his back on San\u003cbr\u003eFrancisco, and started for Boston, he began a tour that the greatest\u003cbr\u003eauthor of any age might have been proud of. It was a veritable\u003cbr\u003eovation\u003cbr\u003ethat swelled from sea to sea: the classic sheep was sacrificed all\u003cbr\u003ealong\u003cbr\u003ethe route. I have often thought that if Bret Harte had met with a\u003cbr\u003efatal\u003cbr\u003eaccident during that transcontinental journey, the world would have\u003cbr\u003edeclared with one voice that the greatest genius of his time was lost\u003cbr\u003eto\u003cbr\u003eit.\"\u003cbr\u003eIn Boston he entered into an arrangement with the predecessors of the\u003cbr\u003epublishers of this volume, and his contributions appeared in their\u003cbr\u003eperiodicals and were gathered into volumes. The arrangement in one\u003cbr\u003eform\u003cbr\u003ePage 2\u003cbr\u003eComplete Poetical Works\u003cbr\u003eor another continued to the time of his death, and has for witness a\u003cbr\u003estately array of comely volumes; but the prose has far outstripped the\u003cbr\u003epoetry. There are few writers of Mr. Harte's prodigality of nature\u003cbr\u003ewho\u003cbr\u003ehave used with so much fine reserve their faculty for melodious verse,\u003cbr\u003eand the present volume contains the entire body of his poetical work,\u003cbr\u003egrowing by minute accretions during thirty odd years.\u003cbr\u003eIn 1878 he was appointed United States Consul at Crefeld, Germany, and\u003cbr\u003eafter that date he resided, with little interruption, on the Continent\u003cbr\u003eor in England. He was transferred to Glasgow in March, 1880, and\u003cbr\u003eremained there until July, 1885. During the rest of his life he made\u003cbr\u003ehis home in London. His foreign residence is disclosed in a number of\u003cbr\u003eprose sketches and tales and in one or two poems; but life abroad\u003cbr\u003enever\u003cbr\u003edimmed the","brand":"All classic book warehouse","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47083767726320,"sku":"2940014501125","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940014501125_p0.jpg?v=1763609663","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014501125","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}