Brett Harte

“The Outcasts of Poker Flat”

Literary Terms• Local Color

– Rough and tumble West– Stereotypes of what easterners would have

thought of westerners• 3rd person omniscient

– Ability to “see inside” the other characters• Characterization (both direct and indirect)

– Direct draws distinctions between Oakhurst and the other characters

– Indirect draws conclusions about characters based on their actions

• Theme

• Achieved fame as a regional Western writer

• Although, his basic attitudes were more Eastern than Western

• Wrote fixed formulas of western gold miners “Forty-Niners”– Mild humor, colorful

characters, colorful language, and situations where virtues finally triumphed over apparent immoralities

“At the height of his career, in the 1860s and 1870s, Bret Harte was one of the most famous and most highly paid American writers. His popular accounts of life in Gold Rush-era California, including short stories such as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," seized the public imagination and made him an international celebrity. Harte's invention of prototypical "western" characters--the shady prospector, the cynical gambler, the tough cowboy, the prostitute with a heart of gold--created the mythology through which Americans learned to understand the culture of the "Old West." Combining realistic descriptions of the specific regional characteristics of California life with sentimental plots, Harte hit on a formula that delighted nineteenth-century readers and continues to influence American narratives of the West.” (Annenberg)

• Comprehension: Who are the central characters in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat"? How do they construct or participate in stereotypes about characters from the Old West? How do they challenge these stereotypes?

• Context: Bret Harte was a mentor to Mark Twain, giving him some of his first writing assignments and, according to Twain, teaching him a great deal about his craft: "He trimmed and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters." Later, however, Twain attacked Harte's work as overly romantic, unbelievable, and repetitive. How is Harte's work similar to Twain's? What ideals and narrative strategies do they share? How are they different?

• Exploration: Compare the plot and characters of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" to the plot and characters of one or more Western movies (Stagecoach, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Unforgiven, or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for example). How do subsequent American portraits of the Old West draw from Harte's depictions? What familiar ideas about the Old West seem to start in Harte's work?

• Excerpt and questions

• “American Passages: A Literary Survey.” Annenberg Lerner. Annenberb Foundation.

• http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit08/author_activ-6b.html