Who was Bret Harte?
Grolier Online reports (see reference at bottom of page): Bret Harte Born: August 25, 1836, in Albany, New York Died: May 5, 1902 The rough and feisty mining camps of the Wild West were brought vividly to life in the stories of Bret Harte, whose gold-rush tales made him famous. In such stories as “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Harte described the California wilderness, its crude frontier settlements, and the colorful characters whose dreams of striking it rich rarely came true. He actually spent little time on the frontier that his stories described. Francis Brett Hart was the third of Henry and Elizabeth Ostrander Hart’s four children. Elizabeth was from a cultured Dutch family, and Henry was a schoolteacher. From his parents, young Harte developed a love of literature and history. He was an avid reader and adored books by Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimoore Cooper. Harte’s father died when the boy was nine years old. His widowed mother moved the fami
Bret C. Harte was a 1998 graduate of Miramonte High School in Orinda, California. He went on to graduate from Bowdoin College in Maine in 2002. He returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue his passion for directing theater. By 2005 he had worked in several capacities with the California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda, the Calvary Presbyterian Theater Group and Actors Rhapsody in San Francisco, the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, the San Leandro Players, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In March of 2005 Bret was killed in an auto accident caused by a hit and run driver.
