Selected Stories and Sketches (The ^AWorld's Classics)

In the 1870s Bret Harte was the most widely read and well-paid author in the United States. Stories such as The Luck of Roaring Camp--the tale of a Gold Rush community that thrilled readers upon its publication in 1868--virtually invented California as a subject for literature and exerted a profound influence on the development of the short story form in America. This collection contains his best work and demonstrates Harte's remarkable control of reader response, his treatment of repressed passion and male anxieties, and his sympathy for marginal members of frontier society.