Francis Bret Harte was born in New York in 1839, and moved to California in 1854. There he worked as a miner, teacher, stagecoach driver and journalist and was eventually appointed Secretary of the San Francisco Branch Mint. His first writings were for The Californian, where he worked with Mark Twain. He became the editor of The Overland Monthly in 1868, which brought his fiction to national fame. The magazine also debuted the work of Jack London, Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith. Harte’s stories and poems set in the American West were extremely popular in the Eastern U.S., and in 1871 he moved to New York, then to Boston. In 1878 he was appointed U.S. Consul to Germany, and later Consul to Scotland and England, where he died in 1902.