People note American writer Francis Bret Harte for

The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870), his best-known collection of his stories about California mining towns.

People best remember this poet for his short-story fiction, featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the Gold Rush. In a career, spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern United States to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but people most often reprinted, adapted, and admired his tales of the Gold Rush.

Parents named him after Francis Brett, his great-grandfather. Bernard Hart,