" As a professional humorist, he has paid
the obligatory tax for his extravagance, over-emphasis, and
undisciplined taste, but such faults are swiftly forgotten when
one turns to Huckleberry Finn and the negro Jim and Pudd'nhead
Wilson, when one feels Mark Twain's power in sheer description
and episode, his magic in evoking landscape and atmosphere, his
blazing scorn at injustice and cruelty, his contempt for quacks.
Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears less well than
Mark Twain as a personal figure, but has a sure place in the
evolution of the American short story, and he did for the
mining-camps of California what Clemens wrought for the
Mississippi River: he became their profane poet. Yet he was never
really of them. He was the clever outsider, with a prospector's
eye, looking for literary material, and finding a whole rich mine
of it--a bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really qualified
to work. But he located a golden vein of it with an instinct that
did credit to his dash of Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a
teacher's son, brought up on books and in many cities, Harte
emigrated to California in 1854 at the age of sixteen.
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