The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales

The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales - With Condensed Novels, Spanish and American Legends, and Earlier Papers

The opportunity here offered [Footnote: By the appearance in England several years ago of an edition of the authors writings as then collected.] to give some account of the genesis of these Californian sketches, and the conditions under which they were conceived, is peculiarly tempting to an author who has been obliged to retain a decent professional reticence under a cloud of ingenious surmise, theory, and misinterpretation. He very gladly seizes this opportunity to establish the chronology of the sketches, and incidentally to show that what are considered the happy accidents of literature are very apt to be the results of quite logical and often prosaic processes. The authors first volume was published in 1865 in a thin book of verse, containing, besides the titular poem, The Lost Galleon, various patriotic contributions to the lyrics of the Civil War, then raging, and certain better known humorous pieces, which have been hitherto interspersed with his later poems in separate volumes, but are now restored to their former companionship. This was followed in 1867 by The Condensed Novels, originally contributed to the San Francisco Californian, a journal then edited by the author, and a number of local sketches entitled Bohemian Papers, making a single not very plethoric volume, the authors first book of prose. But he deems it worthy of consideration that during this period, i.e. from 1862 to 1866, he produced The Society upon the Stanislaus and The Story of Mliss,the first a dialectical poem, the second a Californian romance,his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility,a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better-known pages of The Overland Monthly, he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of The Luck of Roaring Camp and the poem of the Heathen Chinee. But it was one of the anomalies of the very condition of life that he worked amidst, and endeavored to portray, that these first efforts were rewarded by very little success; and, as he will presently show, even The Luck of Roaring Camp depended for its recognition in California upon its success elsewhere. Hence the critical reader will observe that the bulk of these earlier efforts, as shown in the first two volumes, were marked by very little flavor of the soil, but were addressed to an audience half foreign in their sympathies, and still imbued with Eastern or New England habits and literary traditions. Home was still potent with these voluntary exiles in their moments of relaxation. Eastern magazines and current Eastern literature formed their literary recreation, and the sale of the better class of periodicals was singularly great. Nor was the taste confined to American literature. The illustrated and satirical English journals were as frequently seen in California as in Massachusetts; and the author records that he has experienced more difficulty in procuring a copy of Punch in an English provincial town than was his fortune at Red Dog or One-Horse Gulch. An audience thus liberally equipped and familiar with the best modern writers was naturally critical and exacting, and no one appreciates more than he does the salutary effects of this severe discipline upon his earlier efforts. When the first number of The Overland Monthly appeared, the author, then its editor, called the publishers attention to the lack of any distinctive Californian romance in its pages, and averred that, should no other contribution come in, he himself would supply the omission in the next number. No other contribution was offered, and the author, having the plot and general idea already in his mind, in a few days sent the manuscript of The Luck of Roaring Camp to the printer. He had not yet received the proof-sheets when he was suddenly summoned to the office of the publisher, whom he found standing the picture of dismay and anxiety with the proof before him. The indignation and stupefaction of the author can be well understood when he was told that the printer, instead of returning the proofs to him, submitted them to the publisher, with the emphatic declaration that the matter thereof was so indecent, irreligious, and improper that his proof-readera young ladyhad with difficulty been induced to continue its perusal, and that he, as a friend of the publisher and a well-wisher of the magazine, was impelled to present to him personally this shameless evidence of the manner in which the editor was imperilling the future of that enterprise. It should be premised that the critic was a man of character and standing, the head of a large printing establishment, a church member, and, the author thinks, a deacon. In which circumstances the publisher frankly admitted to the author that, while he could not agree with all of the printers criticisms, he thought the story open to grave objection, and its publication of doubtful expediency. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 6373
Author: Harte, Bret
Release Date: Aug 1, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English