BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bret Harte. (1839–1902.) The Lost Galleon and Other Tales [Poems], 1867; Condensed Novels and Other Papers, 1867; The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, 1870; Plain Language from Truthful James, 1870; The Pliocene Skull, 1871; Poems, 1871; East and West Poems, 1871; The Heathen Chinee and Other Poems, 1871; Poetical Works, 1872; Mrs. Skagg's Husbands, 1873; M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain, 1873; Echoes of the Foot-Hills [Poems], 1875; Tales of the Argonauts, 1875; Gabriel Conroy, 1876; Two Men of Sandy Bar, 1876; Thankful Blossom, 1877; The Story of a Mine, 1878; Drift from Two Shores, 1878; The Twins of Table Mountain, 1879; Works in five volumes, 1882; Flip, and Found at Blazing Star, 1882; In the Carquinez Woods, 1884; On the Frontier, 1884; Maruja, 1885; By Shore and Sedge, 1885; Snow Bound at Eagle's, 1885; A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready, 1887; The Crusade of the Excelsior, 1887; The Argonauts of North Liberty, 1888; A Phyllis of the Sierras, 1888; Cressy, 1889; The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh, 1889; A Waif of the Plains, 1890; A Ward of the Golden Gate, 1890; A Sappho of Green Springs, 1891; Colonel Starbottle's Client, 1892; A First Family of Tasajara, 1892; Susy: a Story of the Plains, 1893; Sally Dows and Other Stories, 1893; A Protégé of Jack Hamlin's, 1894; The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, 1894; In a Hollow of the Hills, 1895; Clarence, 1895; Barker's Luck, 1896; Three Partners, 1897; Tales of Trail and Town, 1898; Stories in Light and Shadow, 1898; Mr. Jack Hamlin's Meditation, 1899; From Sandhill to Pine, 1900; Under the Redwoods, 1901; Openings in the Old Trail, 1902; Life of Bret Harte, by T. Edgar Pemberton, 1903; Bret Harte, by Henry W. Boynton, 1905; The Life of Bret Harte with Some Account of the California Pioneers, by Henry Childs Merwin, 1911.
[CHAPTER V]
THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY
The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Stedman, came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The movement was not confined to America. In the early seventies, as we have seen, Millet and his Breton peasants for a time took possession of French art; Hardy with his Wessex natives caught the ear of England; Björnson made the discovery that in the Scandinavian peasant lay the only survival of the old Norse spirit; and the Russians Tourgenieff and Tolstoy cast aside the old mythology and told with minuteness the life of the peasant and the serf. Everywhere there was a swing toward the wild and unconventional, even toward the coarse and repulsive. The effeminacy of early Tennysonianism, the cloying sweetness of the mid-century annual, Keatsism, Hyperionism, Heineism, had culminated in reaction. There was a craving for the acrid tang of uncultivated things in borderlands and fields unsown.
In America had sprung up a group of humorists who had filled the newspapers and magazines of the era with that masculine laughter which was echoing along the Mississippi and the Ohio and the gold camps of the Sierras. They were pioneers; they were looking for incongruities and exaggerations, and quite by accident they discovered a new American type, the Pike,—strange creature to inspire a new literature.