Sappho of Green Springs

Francis Bret Harte was born on August 25, 1836, in Albany (New York State), where his father was a teacher of Greek in a college. He got his name in honor of his great-grandfather—Francis Brett (Francis Brett). Over time, his father changed the surname from Hart to Harte, and Francis Bret Harte preferred the second name, shortened to Bret.

His father died early, so the future writer had to earn a living himself. In 1854, soon after the start of the “gold rush,” he moved to California, where he tried many different jobs.

Harte published his first stories in 1856 in the magazine “The Californian,” which he himself edited. Later he also published “The Overland Monthly” (1868–1871), the first significant magazine in the western states of America. In the 1870s, by then already a well-known writer, Harte lived in New York, and then—partly for material reasons, partly due to a worsening conflict with American public opinion caused by the writer’s harsh and uncompromising civic stance—he left for Europe: he was an American consul in the Prussian city of Krefeld, and then in Glasgow. The rest of his life he spent in England. He died on May 5, 1902 in Camberly of throat cancer.

Francis Bret Harte is credited with the novel “Gabriel Conroy,” a number of novellas, among which the later trilogy “The Outcast of the Plains,” “Susy,” and “Clarence” (set during the U.S. Civil War) is the best known; original poems; literary parodies popular at the time (of Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Victor Hugo, and others); and even a play written in collaboration with Mark Twain. However, his greatest popularity came from his stories—and in his stories, the images of ordinary people of the Wild West, especially the young women and women.