Categories
- Antiques & Collectibles 13
- Architecture 36
- Art 48
- Bibles 22
- Biography & Autobiography 813
- Body, Mind & Spirit 139
- Business & Economics 28
- Children's Books 12
- Children's Fiction 9
- Computers 4
- Cooking 94
- Crafts & Hobbies 4
- Drama 346
- Education 46
- Family & Relationships 57
- Fiction 11825
- Games 19
- Gardening 17
- Health & Fitness 34
- History 1377
- House & Home 1
- Humor 147
- Juvenile Fiction 1873
- Juvenile Nonfiction 202
- Language Arts & Disciplines 88
- Law 16
- Literary Collections 686
- Literary Criticism 179
- Mathematics 13
- Medical 41
- Music 40
- Nature 179
- Non-Classifiable 1768
- Performing Arts 7
- Periodicals 1453
- Philosophy 64
- Photography 2
- Poetry 896
- Political Science 203
- Psychology 42
- Reference 154
- Religion 509
- Science 126
- Self-Help 81
- Social Science 81
- Sports & Recreation 34
- Study Aids 3
- Technology & Engineering 59
- Transportation 23
- Travel 463
- True Crime 29
Bret Harte

Bret Harte was an American author and poet best known for his short stories and poetry about pioneering life in California. His works, such as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," captured the essence of the Old West and made him one of the most popular writers of the 19th century. Harte's vivid storytelling and unique characters influenced later writers and left a lasting legacy in American literature.
Author's Books:
Sort by:
by:
Bret Harte
PROLOGUE There was no mistake this time: he had struck gold at last! It had lain there before him a moment ago—a misshapen piece of brown-stained quartz, interspersed with dull yellow metal; yielding enough to have allowed the points of his pick to penetrate its honeycombed recesses, yet heavy enough to drop from the point of his pick as he endeavored to lift it from the red earth. He was seeing all...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
I The time was the year of grace 1779; the locality, Morristown, New Jersey. It was bitterly cold. A northeasterly wind had been stiffening the mud of the morning's thaw into a rigid record of that day's wayfaring on the Baskingridge road. The hoof-prints of cavalry, the deep ruts left by baggage-wagons, and the deeper channels worn by artillery, lay stark and cold in the waning light of an...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
CHAPTER I. As the master of the Indian Spring school emerged from the pine woods into the little clearing before the schoolhouse, he stopped whistling, put his hat less jauntily on his head, threw away some wild flowers he had gathered on his way, and otherwise assumed the severe demeanor of his profession and his mature age—which was at least twenty. Not that he usually felt this an assumption; it...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
A Kiss and an Escape I Only one shot had been fired. It had gone wide of its mark,—the ringleader of the Vigilantes,—and had left Red Pete, who had fired it, covered by their rifles and at their mercy. For his hand had been cramped by hard riding, and his eye distracted by their sudden onset, and so the inevitable end had come. He submitted sullenly to his captors; his companion fugitive and...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
THE MAN ON THE BEACH He lived beside a river that emptied into a great ocean. The narrow strip of land that lay between him and the estuary was covered at high tide by a shining film of water, at low tide with the cast-up offerings of sea and shore. Logs yet green, and saplings washed away from inland banks, battered fragments of wrecks and orange crates of bamboo, broken into tiny rafts yet odorous...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
CHAPTER I The bell of the North Liberty Second Presbyterian Church had just ceased ringing. North Liberty, Connecticut, never on any day a cheerful town, was always bleaker and more cheerless on the seventh, when the Sabbath sun, after vainly trying to coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness from the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere dwellings and the equally sealed and hard-set...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
CHAPTER I. Just where the red track of the Los Gatos road streams on and upward like the sinuous trail of a fiery rocket until it is extinguished in the blue shadows of the Coast Range, there is an embayed terrace near the summit, hedged by dwarf firs. At every bend of the heat-laden road the eye rested upon it wistfully; all along the flank of the mountain, which seemed to pant and quiver in the...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
CHAPTER I WHO SOUGHT IT It was a steep trail leading over the Monterey Coast Range. Concho was very tired, Concho was very dusty, Concho was very much disgusted. To Concho's mind there was but one relief for these insurmountable difficulties, and that lay in a leathern bottle slung over the machillas of his saddle. Concho raised the bottle to his lips, took a long draught, made a wry face, and...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
CHAPTER I. It was very dark, and the wind was increasing. The last gust had been preceded by an ominous roaring down the whole mountain-side, which continued for some time after the trees in the little valley had lapsed into silence. The air was filled with a faint, cool, sodden odor, as of stirred forest depths. In those intervals of silence the darkness seemed to increase in proportion and grow...
more...
by:
Bret Harte
HER LETTER I'msitting alone by the fire,Dressed just as I came from the dance,In a robe evenyouwould admire,—It cost a cool thousand in France;I'm be-diamonded out of all reason,My hair is done up in a cue:In short, sir, "the belle of the season"Is wasting an hour upon you. In short, sir, "the belle of the season" Is wasting an hour upon you A dozenengagements I've...
more...