Harte, Bret. Tales of the Argonauts and Eastern Sketches. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company | The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1900. [11547]
Half calf with gold & peach marbled boards, same marbled paper as end papers, light scuffing/ edge-wear, 8 x 5 1/4 inches, top page edges gilt. 486 clean pp., tight. Good. Hardcover.
A volume of collected stories by Bret Harte, in an attractive binding.
Bret Harte (1836-1902), b. Albany, New York; d. Camberley, England. Harte became famous for his short stories and poems depicting miners, gamblers, and outlaws of the California Gold Rush. In 1854, at the age of 18, Harte went West to the California mining country. He became a journalist for the Northern Californian, a weekly paper, but his writing in support of Indians and Mexicans, especially his denunciation of a massacre of Indians in 1860 impinged upon his safety, and he moved to San Francisco. He began to write short stories, became the editor of the Californian, and in 1868, of the Overland Monthly; he obtained the position of Secretary of the United States Mint in California, and was made Professor of Recent Literature at the University of California. His brilliant successes led to his obtaining a contract with The Atlantic Monthly for $10,000 for 12 stories a year, which was the highest figure offered an American writer up to that time. He returned East and lived a life of dissipation for a few years, collaborated with Mark Twain on the unsuccessful play Ah Sin, a defense of Chinese immigrants, and found no luck on the lecture circuit. In 1878 he became the American consul in Krefeld, Germany, and later in Glasgow, Scotland. He retired to London in 1885, where his tales of the American West remained popular during his lifetime.
