The Hartes crossed Nicaragua to reach a boat on the Pacific Ocean and sailed to San Francisco. The boat sailed from New York to Nicaragua. He later joined a local military company.Īround the time Harte was sixteen and already living on his own, he accompanied his sister on a boat ride from New York to San Francisco, California. By the time he reached thirteen, Harte quit school to work as a clerk.

When he died in 1845, the family was left in dire conditions and moved to New York City. The family moved frequently to wherever Henry Harte could find work as a teacher. Harte's father was a teacher, but many schools closed during financial hard times that began in 1837. Harte's father added an 'e' to the family surname when Harte was a young boy, apparently to distance himself from his father, with whom he did not have a good relationship. He had two older siblings, Eliza and Henry a younger sister, Margaret, was born in 1838. Aspiring writerįrancis Brett Hart was born in Albany, New York, on August 25, 1836, to Henry and Elizabeth Hart. Harte himself experienced the boom and bust of a gold rush: He went from being the highest-paid and most popular writer in America to experiencing a series of personal and professional failures within five years that would challenge him the rest of his life. He carefully recreated distinct California settings, speech patterns of people drawn to mining districts, and details of clothing and manners from people of high society to everyday men and women trying to get rich or find work. Harte was known as a satirist (a writer who uses a humorous tone to criticize human characteristics) and a writer who specialized in regional stories. By 1871, he signed the highest paying publishing contract in American history to that time. In 1868, Bret Harte burst onto the literary scene as a popular writer of tales set in California mining camps and boomtowns and as the founding editor of a new magazine called Overland Monthly.

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