Authors

The most complete collection is The Works of Bret Harte in twenty-five volumes (1914). Harte’s poetry may be found in The Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte (1899). Charles Meeker Kozlay edited Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writings available in the Argonaut edition (1906). Geoffrey Bret Harte edited The Letters of Bret Harte (1926). Joseph B. Harrison edited Bret Harte: Representative Selections (1941). Gary Scharnhorst edited and introduced Bret Harte’s California (1990). Selected Letters of Bret Harte appeared in 1997 edited by Scharnhorst and Robert L. Gale. Much editorial work remains to be done. Gary Scharnhorst’s fine critical biography Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (2000) elegantly furnishes analysis of the life, career, and reception of Harte, with the focus on Harte’s writing life, joining his Twayne volume Bret Harte of 1992. (Also see: Scharnhorst, “A Coda to the Twain-Harte Feud,” Western American Literature [2001].) Focusing on Harte’s financial struggles, Axel Nissen’s Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (2000) provides a lively account of Harte’s life and times. Patrick Morrow’s Bret Harte: Literary Critic (1979) is a judicious account of Harte’s sometimes injudicious criticism. Morrow’s Bret Harte (1972) in the Boise College Western Writers Series provides an adequate brief introduction to the man and his work. The best single bibliography on Harte is Gary Scharnhorst’s Bret Harte: A Bibliography (1995); Linda D. Barnett’s Bret Harte: A Reference Guide (1980) is the best guide to writings about Harte. Queer theorists and Gender Studies critics have recently taken up Harte’s characters; see Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Packard, Chris (2005), which includes essays on James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Harris, Twain, Harte, and Eugene Field; “The Queer Short Story,” Axel Nissen, in The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis (2004), ed. Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei; “Rewriting the Gold Rush: Twain, Harte and Homosociality,” Peter Stoneley, Journal of American Studies (1996); and “ ‘She War a Woman’: Family Roles, Gender, and Sexuality in Bret Harte’s Western Fiction,” J. David Stevens, American Literature (1997).

The most complete collection is The Works of Bret Harte in twenty-five volumes (1914). Harte’s poetry may be found in The Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte (1899). Charles Meeker Kozlay edited Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writings available in the Argonaut edition (1906). Geoffrey Bret Harte edited The Letters of Bret Harte (1926). Joseph B. Harrison edited Bret Harte: Representative Selections (1941). Gary Scharnhorst edited and introduced Bret Harte’s California (1990). Selected Letters of Bret Harte appeared in 1997 edited by Scharnhorst and Robert L. Gale. Much editorial work remains to be done. Gary Scharnhorst’s fine critical biography Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (2000) elegantly furnishes analysis of the life, career, and reception of Harte, with the focus on Harte’s writing life, joining his Twayne volume Bret Harte of 1992. (Also see: Scharnhorst, “A Coda to the Twain-Harte Feud,” Western American Literature [2001].) Focusing on Harte’s financial struggles, Axel Nissen’s Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (2000) provides a lively account of Harte’s life and times. Patrick Morrow’s Bret Harte: Literary Critic (1979) is a judicious account of Harte’s sometimes injudicious criticism. Morrow’s Bret Harte (1972) in the Boise College Western Writers Series provides an adequate brief introduction to the man and his work. The best single bibliography on Harte is Gary Scharnhorst’s Bret Harte: A Bibliography (1995); Linda D. Barnett’s Bret Harte: A Reference Guide (1980) is the best guide to writings about Harte. Queer theorists and Gender Studies critics have recently taken up Harte’s characters; see Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Packard, Chris (2005), which includes essays on James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Harris, Twain, Harte, and Eugene Field; “The Queer Short Story,” Axel Nissen, in The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis (2004), ed. Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei; “Rewriting the Gold Rush: Twain, Harte and Homosociality,” Peter Stoneley, Journal of American Studies (1996); and “ ‘She War a Woman’: Family Roles, Gender, and Sexuality in Bret Harte’s Western Fiction,” J. David Stevens, American Literature (1997).

There has yet to be a complete works of Mary Austin or a definitive biography, though she has inspired heightened interest among critics in recent years. Her autobiographical novel, A Woman of Genius (1912), was reprinted in 1985 by the Feminist Press and is now seen as a precursor of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Streetand a counterpoint to Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, as it deals poignantly with the costs of a woman’s ambitions. On this see “Mary Austin’s A Woman of Genius: The Text, the Novel, and the Problem of Male Publishers and Critics and Female Authors” by Karen S. Langlois (1992). The Mary Austin Reader (1996), ed. Esther Lanigan, is a collection of essays, novels, plays, short stories, poems and articles. Literary America, 1903–1931: The Mary Austin Letters, ed. Thomas Matthews Pearce (1979), is a collection of letters written to Austin by literary and political contemporaries, reflecting the important contributions of women writers to the socio-political climate of the time. Beyond Borders: The Selected Essays of Mary Austin (1995) is edited by Reuben J. Ellis: essays cover such subjects Austin’s self-promotion as Native American expert and her nature advocacy and proto-feminist tracts. The Land of Little Rain is available in a Penguin edition edited by Terry Tempest Williams (1997); The Land of Journeys’ Ending, ed. Melody Graulich (2003), from the University of Illinois Press; The Flock from University of Nevada Press (2001). In literary criticism David Wyatt’s The Fall Into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (1986) suggests that in Austin’s work setting assumes a mythological significance constructed from first settlers into contemporary times, and connects her regionalism to that of John Muir, Norris, John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, and Gary Snyder. Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (1990) by Esther Lanigan Stineman situates Austin within the contexts of class, race, gender, and Native American advocacy, arguing that she was far ahead of her time on these issues. In Writing the Western Landscape (1994) Ann H. Zwinger contrasts Austin’s nature writings with those of a male contemporary, John Muir; in Dancing Ghosts: Native American and Christian Syncretism in Mary Austin’s Works (1998) Mark T. Hayer examines how Austin attempted to reconcile Native spirituality with Christianity; Through the Window, Out the Door (1998) by american literature 1865–1914 Janis P. Stout rejects masculinist interpretations of Austin’s work for more distinctly feminine conceptualizations of wayfaring, nostalgia for home, and related issues; Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin, 1999, ed. Melody Fraulich and Elizabeth Klimasmith, is a collection of essays arguing for the primacy of Austin’s stature in modern feminist and environmental movements; The Wild and the Domestic: Animal Representation, Ecocriticism, and Western American Literature (2000) by Barney Nelson uses published and unpublished Austin writings to refute the mythic image of the West as merely a wild space; Stacy Alaimo’s chapter on Austin in her Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000) opposes Austin to “conservationist” clubwomen of the Progressive Era, as Austin saw undomesticated desert space as a “fertile ground for feminism”; “Creating Great Women: Mary Austin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” by Melody Graulich, offers an incisive comparison of the two writers, in Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight, eds., Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts (2004). Mary Austin’s Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography (2004) by Heike Schaefer draws from unpublished materials and a full range of Austin’s literary and theoretical writing to examine Austin’s reworking of the traditions of nature writing and women’s regionalism to imagine a sustainable and democratic American culture.