LOCAL COLOR
19th-century Regional Writing in the United States


b>Notes to Bret Harte: Popularity, Poetry and Performance (Anxiety)



 :  As of 11/25/97 I am still working on the notes file here--in the process of tranferring for one format to another, I either added or lost a #. If you need a citation before I get it fixed just message me.


1 "Review of William Flagg, A Good Investment; a Story of the Upper Ohio, " The Atlantic Monthly, 30 (October 1872): 487.

2 Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 74.

3 The experiences of Harte, Miller and others mentioned here (in terms of audience expectations) provide a striking example of Roland Barthes' assertion that 'realism' functions as a cultural code for what is already known; S/Z, trans. R. Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975). In addition, for an intriguing discussion of the disruptive power of mimicry and cultural representation, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. 85-92.

4 See Owen Wister, "Old Yellowstone Days" in Owen Wister's West: Selected Articles, ed. Robert Murray Davis (Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 1987): 151-68; and Darwin Payne, Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), chpts. VII-IX. The implications of constructing a "masculine" western identity have been the subject of scholarly attention in recent years--classic works such as G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederick Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (1969; reprint, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989) have been joined by Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800-1890, (New York: Athenaeum, 1985), and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chpt. 5.

5 Quoted in Edd Winfield Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 116.

6 Wallace Stegner, "Western Record and Romance," in Literary History of the United States, 2 vols., edited by Robert E. Spiller et. al., 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 1:866.

7 For an excellent discussion of the issues and institutions germane to regional identity in the West, see Clyde A. Milner II, "The View from Wisdom: Four Layers of History and Regional Identity," in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, eds. William Cronin, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 203-22. A similar situation characterized social relations in Cincinnati during Stowe's years there (1832-50). Histories of literary culture in the Ohio Valley are filled with names of writers and editors who were born and raised in the East. James Hall, editor of the Western Monthly Magazine, spent his boyhood in Pennsylvania (Stowe's sketches of New England first appeared in his Ohio-based periodical). For more on the publishing climate of the 'old Northwest,' see Joan D. Hedrick, "Parlor Literature: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Question of 'Great Women Artists,'" Signs, 17 (Winter 1992): 275-303; Sandra A. Zagarell, "Introduction," in Caroline Kirkland, A New Home, Who'll Follow (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), ix-l; and W. H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley: Historical and Biographical Sketches (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1891).

8 Walker, San Francisco's Literary Frontier, 13, 14. Many notable writers were in residence in California at that time; the halls of the University of California, (established in 1855), Jessie FrŽmont's salon, and local saloons could claim the presence of such diverse figures as Thomas Starr King, Charles Warren Stoddard, Prentice Mulford, Samuel Clemens, Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, Clarence King, Henry George, Josiah Royce, and Hubert Bancroft.

9 By "hybrid," I mean the mix of recently-arrived easterners and the Mexicans, Spaniards, Native Americans and others who had lived in this region for a longer period.

10 In the late 1850s, Harte had a teaching position that paid $25/mo. From 1863-69 his post with the US Branch Mint paid $270/mo. (Scharnhorst, Bret Harte, 18). In accepting the Fields, Osgood offer he more than tripled his income (from a comfortable $3,340 to a luxurious $10,000).

11 King and Fields quoted in Scharnhorst, 7, 8.

12 His publications in this period include Outcroppings (1865), a compilation of verse by California poets which he edited, and Lost Galleon and Other Tales (1867). He also edited the local paper, The Californian (1864-66).

13 Harte was earning the same rate from these eastern periodicals as from western ones: $10 each. The advantage seems to have been not a matter of net income but of exposure to the more influential eastern market.

14 Harte to Henry Bellows, 9 April 1869 quoted in Scharnhorst, 22.

15 "The Plain Language" was published as filler in Harte's Sept 1870 issue of Overland Monthly, while Hay's poems first appeared in the New York Tribune in Dec 1870 and January of 1871 respectively. Reading the poems, one can see why readers would group together, but their writers were very different types. John Hay was a mid-westerner. He was born in Salem, Indiana, spent most of his childhood and youth in Illinois, left to take a degree at Brown and then returned to study law in his uncle's office next door to Abraham Lincoln. A man of letters, like later local color writers William Allen White of Kansas and Thomas Nelson Page of Virginia, Hay served as Lincoln's personal secretary, then was appointed to the diplomatic corp, and having returned in 1870, was--at this time, serving as an editor for the NY Weekly Tribune--where the poems appeared. Hay would go on to serve as Asst Sec of State, Ambassador to England, and Secretary of State. In addition to his political career, Hay published a very popular volume of essays on Spain, a handful of short stories, one of the earliest anti-labor union novels, The Breadwinners (serialized in Century 1883-4, then released in book form in 1884), before turning to history--publishing with John Nicolay the 10-volume Life of Lincoln (1890). not in Bib yet] See Robert L. Gale, John Hay (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978).

16 Scharnhorst, Bret Harte, 36.

17 "The Pike Poetry" Galaxy, Nov. 1871: 635.

18 "The Pike Poetry," 635. See Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1966): 131-2.

19 See for example, John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1971); and Willard Thorp, "Defenders of Ideality," in Literary History of the United States, 2 vols., eds. Robert E. Spiller et. al., 3rd ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1963], 1:809-26. The Idealist poets--Richard Henry Stoddard, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, George Henry Boker, and Bayard Taylor, along with editors Edmund Clarence Stedman, George William Curtis, and Richard Watson Gilder, one of whom doubtless wrote this anonymous review--seem to have guarded the portals to "good" poetry zealously, monitoring it more closely than short fictional prose, which often continued to resemble the less elite anecdote and the tall tale.

20 Mott, History of American Magazines, 2:505. For discussions about Fields see William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), chpt. 10; and Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).




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This document was last modified 11/25/97.