Salomy Jane Illustrated

By Bret Harte

When beautiful Salomy Jane resists the romantic advances of a young ruffian, she is rescued by Jack Dart, who has his own additional reasons for tangling with the man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716596650

Bret Harte

Bret Harte (1836–1902) was an author and poet known for his romantic depictions of the American West and the California gold rush. Born in New York, Harte moved to California when he was seventeen and worked as a miner, messenger, and journalist. In 1868 he became editor of the Overland Monthly, a literary journal in which he published his most famous work, “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” In 1871 Harte returned east to further his writing career. He spent his later years as an American diplomat in Germany and Britain.

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About Harte:

Bret Harte, original name Francis Brett Harte, (born August 25, 1836, Albany, New York, U.S.—died May 5, 1902, London, England), American writer who helped create the local-colour school in American fiction.

Harte’s family settled in New York City and Brooklyn in 1845. His education was spotty and irregular, but he inherited a love of books and managed to get some verses published at age 11. In 1854 he left for California and went into mining country on a brief trip that legend has expanded into a lengthy participation in, and intimate knowledge of, camp life. In 1857 he was employed by the Northern Californian, a weekly paper. There his support of Indians and Mexicans proved unpopular; after a massacre of Indians in 1860, which he editorially deplored, he found it advisable to leave town.

Returning to San Francisco, he was married and began to write for the Golden Era, which published the first of his Condensed Novels, brilliant parodies of James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and others. He then became a clerk in the U.S. branch mint, a job that allowed freedom for editorship of the Californian, for which he engaged Mark Twain to write weekly articles.

In 1868, after publishing a series of Spanish legends akin to Washington Irving’s Alhambra, he was named editor of the Overland Monthly. For it he wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat. Following The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870), he found himself world famous. His fame only grew with the poem Plain Language from Truthful James (1870), better known as The Heathen Chinee, although it attracted national attention in a manner unintended by Harte, who claimed that its satirical story—about two men, Bill Nye and Ah Sin, trying to cheat each other at cards—showed a form of racial equality. Instead, the poem was taken up by opponents of Chinese immigration.

Flushed with success, Harte in 1871 signed with The Atlantic Monthly for $10,000 for 12 stories a year, the highest figure offered an American writer up to that time. Resigning a professorship at the University of California, Harte left for the East, never to return. In New England he was greeted as an equal by the writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Dean Howells and was lionized and toasted to the point of spiritual and moral breakdown. With personal and family difficulties, his work slumped. It was at about this time that Harte collaborated with Twain on