Mark Twain first hit it big as a writer in California. In an Angel’s Camp tavern in 1864, he overheard the tale that would become his breakthrough short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” To some extent, Twain credited his shift from hack reporter to mature writer to his mentor, Bret Harte. Though Harte was a year younger than Twain, he was the more established of the two and would soon produce popular stories like “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” Twain said that Harte changed him “from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.”
By the 1870s, both men were on the East Coast, and Harte was struggling financially, his life in shambles, his work no longer popular. When he was offered a position as United States consul to Germany, Twain—by then a famous author—wrote a letter protesting the post in no uncertain terms. “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward,” he ranted. “He is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth…as if he considered it a disgrace…. To send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much.”
The explosion of their friendship led to a feud lasting more than 30 years. What happened between these writers is hard to pinpoint, since Twain embellished the truth and Harte rarely spoke about the break. But one thing is clear: it happened while they were collaborating on a project based on Harte’s poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” or, as it came to be called, “The Heathen Chinee.” Written as a satire of racism, the poem was used by bigots to promote anti-Chinese legislation—much to Harte’s dismay. Despite this, Harte and Twain later decided to combine their star power and write a play centering the Chinese character in the poem. It would be called Ah Sin.
When Twain and Harte met in 1864 in San Francisco, they had a
