…he started the “Western” genre…

Book review:

Stories of the Early West

by Bret Harte (1836-1902)

He chronicled the California Gold Rush days

New York: Platt & Munk, Publishers, 1964

512 pages

Here are 17 “Exciting Tales of Mining and Frontier Days,” courtesy of the 19th century writer who made those days famous. It’s reasonably fair to say that Bret Harte started the “Western” tradition in American literature.

He had what it took to do so. Harte lived the life of the hardy souls who streamed into the gold mining camps, and he wrote about them with authority, compassion, and decent respect.

Of course, like you, I’ve heard about “The Outcasts of Poker Flats” throughout my life. Stories of the Early West has been on my shelves for a few years—finally, this week, I grabbed it and read “Poker Flats” and “Tennessee’s Partner” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and a few others.

Harte is no mean story teller.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark suggests in his Foreword that Harte shared some talent and style with the likes of Jack London, Mark Twain and O. Henry. Naturally, I think it’s beyond dispute that each of those four had a memorably distinctive style.

I’ll take O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862-1910) any day. O. Henry had panache that Harte probably never imagined in his dreams. From a technical point of view, I suggest that Harte wasted some of the money he saved for a writing coach, and he could have benefited from a more attentive editor—I get it, Harte’s distinctive style is colloquial, yet it tends here and there to be stuffy, approaching careless, sometimes slapdash.

One gets the impression that Harte was dashing off Stories of the Early West in a raggedy notebook, perhaps with the stub of a pencil, perhaps in poor light…it’s not real clear that Harte was real interested in re-reading and refining his work.

These “Exciting Tales” in Stories of the Early West are rough gems.

Maybe Mr. Oakhurst talked just the way Harte says he did.

* * * * * *

A Farewell to Arms (book review)

classic Ernest Hemingway

with relentlessly realistic dialogue…

click here

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many waters: more poems with 53 free verse poems,

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