SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

WORKS BY BRET HARTE

The standard editions are the 19-volume Standard Library Edition of The Writings of Bret Harte published by Houghton Mifflin (c. 1897-1906), largely reproduced in the 25-volume “Argonaut” edition of The Works of Bret Harte issued by P. F. Collier & Son of New York (1907). These editions should be supplemented by Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. Charles Meeker Kozlay (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914); Ah Sin: A Dramatic Work, by Harte and Mark Twain, ed. Frederick Anderson (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1961); and Bret Harte’s California: Letters to the Springfield Republican and Christian Register 1866-1867, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990).

Scharnhorst has edited the most recent edition of Harte’s letters: Selected Letters of Bret Harte (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). However, Geoffrey Bret Harte’s Letters of Bret Harte (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926) contains texts of additional correspondence. See also Bradford A. Booth’s “Unpublished Letters of Bret Harte,” American Literature, 16 (May 1944), 131-142; “Bret Harte Goes East: Some Unpublished Letters,” American Literature, 19 ( January 1948), 318-335; and Brenda Murphy and George Monteiro’s “The Unpublished Letters of Bret Harte to John Hay,” American Literary Realism, 12 (Spring 1979), 77-110.

The most comprehensive listing of Harte’s writings is Scharnhorst’s Bret Harte: A Bibliography (Metuchen, N.J.: Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995).

WORKS ABOUT BRET HARTE

While dated, the standard list of criticism and scholarship is Linda Diz Barrett’s Bret Harte: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).

Harte has been fortunate in his biographers, among them George R. Stewart, Jr.’s Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931); Axel Nissen’s Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000); and Scharnhorst’s Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).

 

Duckett, Margaret. Mark Twain and Bret Harte.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. May, Ernest R. “Bret Harte and the Overland Monthly,” American Literature, 22 (November 1950), 260-271.

Scharnhorst, Gary. Bret Harte. New York: Twayne, 1992.

———. “Browning and Bret Harte,” ANQ, ns 12 (Summer 1999), 41-43.

Williams, Stanley T. “Ambrose Bierce and Bret Harte,” American Literature, 17 (May 1945), 179-180.

ESSAYS ON HARTE’S STORIES AND POEMS

Boggan, J.R. “The Regeneration of Roaring Camp,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 22 (December 1967), 271-280.

Connor, William F. “The Euchring of Tennessee: A Reexamination of Bret Harte’s ‘Tennessee’s Partner,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction , 17 (Spring 1980), 113-120.

Duckett, Margaret. “Bret Harte’s Portrayal of Half-Breeds,” American Literature, 25 (May 1953), 193-212.

———. “Plain Language from Bret Harte,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 11 (March 1957), 241-260.

Gardner, Joseph H. “Bret Harte and the Dickensian Mode in America,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 2 (Fall 1971), 89-101.

Glover, Donald E. “A Reconsideration of Bret Harte’s Later Works.” Western American Literature, 8 (Fall 1973), 143-151.

Kolb, Harold H., Jr. “The Outcasts of Literary Flat: Bret Harte as Humorist,” American Literary Realism, 23 (Winter 1991), 52-63.

May, Charles E. “Bret Harte’s ‘Tennessee’s Partner’: The Reader Euchred,” South Dakota Review, 15 (Spring 1977), 109-117.

Scharnhorst, Gary. “ ‘Ways That Are Dark’: Appropriations of Bret Harte’s ‘Plain Language from Truthful James,’ ” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51 (December 1996), 377-399.

Thomas, Jeffrey F. “Bret Harte and the Power of Sex,” Western American Literature, 8 (Fall 1973), 91-109.

GENERAL STUDIES OF WESTERN LITERATURE

Bold, Christine. Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Bredahl, A. Carl. New Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Etulain, Richard W. Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Gale, Robert L., ed. Nineteenth-Century American Western Writers , Dictionary of American Biography volume 186. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.

Kowalewski, Michael, ed. Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Lyon, Thomas J., ed. A Literary History of the American West. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987.

Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.