Bret Harte
From Philosopedia
Harte, (Francis) Bret (25 August 1836 - 6 May 1902)
Francis Brett Hart was the son of Henry Hart, a professor of Greek at the Albany College who was the son of an immigrant who had moved to America and become rich. However, the father left his family in order to marry again. Bret's mother, Elizabeth Rebecca Ostrander Hart, was from the English and Dutch culture and raised her child in a Dutch Reformed church. His father died while Bret was young.
Harte, who was born in Albany, New York, was named after his Great-grandfather Francis Brett. His father changed the spelling from Hart to Harte, and Francis preferred that he be called Bret Harte.
As an adventurer at the age of nineteen, Harte went to California where he taught, clerked, and prospected for gold. By the age of eleven, Bret had published a number of poems. His “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” published in The Overland Monthly, which he had helped establish, brought him much success because of its stories of Western local color.
His humorous dialect poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (also called “The Heathen Chinee”), helped establish him as a well-known author. He wrote “Outcasts of Poker Flat” and other stories, returning to the East in 1871, becoming the U.S. consul in Germany and Scotland from 1878 to 1885.
A Unitarian, he once was a correspondent for their Register, reporting about a traveling evangelist’s visit in California, “We have been spared the cholera, but we have had Mr. Earle badly.”
He attended the church where his friend Starr King preached, and he also attended in New York where O. B. Frothingham preached. According to his biographer, John Pemberton, Harte “was content to worship God through his works. . . . [He] never voiced a creed.” As to any god, Harte once declared, “The creator who could put a cancer in a believer’s stomach is above being interfered with by prayers.”
Harte, after having been appointed the United States Consul in Kerneled, Germany, and then to Glasgow in 1880, spent 24 years living in Europe, where he died in England of throat cancer and is buried at Frimley.
