Selected Stories of Bret Harte - Free Audiobook

This collection brings together short stories by Bret Harte, the American writer whose tales of the California Gold Rush made him one of the most celebrated authors in the United States around 1870. Born in New York state in 1836, Harte moved west as a teenager and worked as a teacher, miner, printer and journalist before becoming the founding editor of the Overland Monthly in San Francisco, where much of his best-known fiction first appeared. He later lived in Europe and spent his final decades in England.

Harte's stories are set mostly in the mining camps, frontier towns and roads of the Sierra Nevada foothills in the years after 1849. His characters are gamblers, miners, stagecoach drivers, saloon keepers, outcasts and the occasional stranger from back east, often rough on the surface but capable of unexpected loyalty and tenderness. He mixes humour, local colour and dialect with strong doses of sentiment, and many stories turn on a moment when a hard community is tested or briefly transformed.

Harte helped create the popular image of the American West and influenced later Western fiction and film. His contemporaries included Mark Twain, who knew him in San Francisco. These stories suit readers who enjoy frontier settings, nineteenth-century American short fiction, and character-driven tales with warmth and irony.