Francis Bret Hart. See what "Bret Hart" is in other dictionaries

Garth, Francis Bret - American writer and poet. Born in Albany, New York, where his father was a college Greek teacher. Bret Garth was by turns teacher, miner, government courier, and finally compositor. Work in the printing house helped to reveal his vocation, and in 1857 he was invited by the editors of the magazine "The golden Era" in San Francisco. Since then, his career as a journalist, publisher and writer began. He did not give up his journal work even when he received a position as secretary of the San Francisco Mint. His first stories - "The Condensed Novels" were published in the magazine "The Californian", which he edited, and from 1868 - began to independently publish the monthly "The Overland Monthly", the first significant magazine in the western states of America. The works of Bret Hart published there finally strengthened his fame as a writer for both America and Europe. In the spring of 1871, Bret Hart stopped publishing the magazine, left the department of literature at the University of California, where he had previously worked for a year, and, at the urgent invitation of The Atlantic Monthly, moved to New York; in 1878 he left for Europe, from where he never returned; at first he was appointed consul in Krefeld (Germany), and in 1880 he was transferred as consul to Glasgow (England). In 1885 he left the service and settled in London, devoting the last years of his life exclusively to literary work. He died in the town of Camberley (England).
The beginning of Bret Garth's literary work coincided with his stay in the western states, which at that time were far behind the eastern ones culturally, but were considered democratic compared to the civilized and aristocratic east of the United States; optimism, activity and audacity of the young country found their own special ways and forms not only in life, but also in literature, while in the east of the United States traditions still taken out of Europe were kept. Bret Garth was born in the East and after several years spent in California, he returned there again, but his work was forever colored with a peculiar flavor of the West. His life, full of unexpected and varied activities, which threw him from the midst of the average American intelligentsia into the uncultured and adventuristic environment of gold prospectors and settlers, gave him a rich supply of impressions and themes. Unfamiliar to American literature until then, Bret Garth drew themes from the lives of gold diggers, gamblers, Asian settlers, criminals and prostitutes. Despite his clearly expressed sympathy for the world of the outcast, he never touched upon the question of class inequality or the social relations between the oppressed and the oppressors. He diligently ennobled all the dark sides of life, and his humor and some pathos smoothed out the sharpness of the topic, making it touching and romantic. Bret Harte is not only one of the first writers of the West, but also one of the founders of the school of "local color" in literature and one of the earliest masters of the short story, a genre new to that time. Bret Garth mastered the short story form completely, so such things as "The Luck of the Roaring Camp", "The Outcosts of Poker Island" or "How Santa Clous came to Simpson's Bar" are much higher than his big stories, and his novel " Gabriel Conroy" and the drama "Two Men of Sandy Bar" were unsuccessful.

Bret Hart also wrote poems, the originality of which is that most of them are written in the local dialect, the so-called. pike. This made his works native and understandable to those segments of the population to whom ordinary literature was little accessible. Especially popular is the poem "Plain language of the truthful James", known as "The heathen Chince". In verse, as in prose, Bret Hart touched on the same themes and described the same life in the 1850s. in California. His poems in dialect are more successful than those written in literary English. Since 1871 - since the appearance of his book of poems "East and West Poems" - poems and stories taken from folk life were considered legal in the dialect.

The later works of Bret Hart are weaker than the first and essentially repeat the former themes and techniques. Its heyday was the 1870s and 1880s. - was a transitional stage from the romantic and sentimental novel of Hawthorne and Beecher Stowe to the new naturalistic American novel.

Biography

Bret Garth owns the novel "Gabriel Conroy", a number of stories, of which the most famous is the later trilogy "Steppe Foundling", "Susie" and "Clarence" (the action takes place during the American Revolutionary War), original poems, popular literary parodies in their time (on Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Victor Hugo, etc.) and even a play co-written with Mark Twain. However, stories brought him the greatest popularity, and in stories - images of ordinary people of the Wild West, especially girlish and female ones.

Bret Harth's wide fame extended not only to the United States, but also to Europe, where Dickens and the young Kipling admired his prose. Quite early, the works of Bret Hart penetrated into Russia (the first publication in the city), where one of his first translators was Chernyshevsky, who was serving a Yakut exile. Already in St. Petersburg, the collected works of Bret Garth were published in six volumes. Bret Garth's connection with Russia is not limited to this: the journey of the Russian merchant Nikolai Rezanov to America and his betrothal to Concepción de Arguello, the daughter of the commandant of the Spanish fortress, familiar to the current reader and viewer from the poem by Andrei Voznesensky and the musical by Alexei Rybnikov "Juno and Avos", for a hundred years used to be the subject of Bret Hart's ballad Concepción de Argueglio.

Trilogy

The Waif of the Plains came out as a separate edition in 1891; "Susy" ("Susy") - in 1893; "Clarence" ("Clarence") - in 1895. These three stories form a trilogy, in the center of which is the life story of the protagonist of all three books - Clarence Brant. Of historical interest is Garth's recreation of the social environment in California from his personal recollections in the activities of supporters of the South. "Clarence" can be seen as a protest against the oblivion in the United States of the progressive, liberation traditions of the Civil War. Shortly after the release of the final part of the trilogy, Bret Hart, in a letter to a friend, says that he wrote this book as "an American for Americans" to explain to his compatriots "what is truly great and powerful in their history."

Collected works in Russian

  • Collected works with a biographical sketch and a portrait of the author in 12 books.
  • Supplement to the magazine Around the World for 1915. M Edition of the Association of Sytin I. D. 1915
  • Complete works in 12 volumes. L. Edition of the Red newspaper. 1928
  • Collected Works in 6 volumes. M. True. 1966

Links

  • Francis Bret Hart in the library of Maxim Moshkov
  • FEB: Bret Hart // Literary Encyclopedia. T. 1. - 1930 (text)

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See what "Bret Hart" is in other dictionaries:

    Bret Garth- see Garth F. B. * * * BRET GART BRET GART, see Garth F. B. (see Francis Bret GART) ... encyclopedic Dictionary

    Bret Garth

    Bret Garth- Bret Hart (Bret Hart) (real name and surname Francis Bret Hart; 1836–1902) - Amer. writer. He was a gold digger, topographer, and journalist. Prince brought world fame. "California stories" (1857 71), "The happiness of the roaring camp" (1868), "Stories about ... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary of Nicknames

    Bret Garth- Francis (Francis Bret Hart, 1839-1902) North American writer and poet. R. in the town of Albania, New York, where his father was a teacher of Greek. in college. B. G. was alternately: a teacher, a miner, a government courier and ... ... Literary Encyclopedia

    BRET GART- BRET GART, see Garth F.B... Modern Encyclopedia

    BRET GART- see Garth F. B... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

    Bret Garth- BRET GART, see Garth F. B... Biographical Dictionary

    Bret Garth

    Bret Garth- (1836 1902) American writer; see Garth Francis Bret... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

    Bret Garth Francis- Francis Bret Harte Francis Bret Harte Date of birth: August 25, 1836 Place of birth: New York, USA Date of death: May 5, 1902 Place of death: USA Citizenship ... Wikipedia

Books

  • Bret Hart. Writings in 3 volumes (set), Bret Hart. Francis Bret Hart is a well-known American writer who won recognition all over the world and was invariably popular in Russia. The set includes 3 volumes with novels, short stories and short stories by Bret...

(1836-1902) American novelist, poet and journalist

The biography of Francis Bret Garth is associated with the adventurous era of the California gold rush - the most interesting period in the public life of America in the 50s. XIX century.

Bret Garth was born in a small town in the family of an intellectual teacher, little adapted to the time of entrepreneurship and hoarding. The father was considered a failure. He died early, and a teenager from the age of 13 had to earn a living. And then, when the first prospectors brought the news of the discovery of gold from the West to the central states, the 17-year-old boy, following his brother, mother and stepfather, waved to California, where tens of thousands of seekers of happiness rushed.

The original owners of what is now American California were Indian tribes. In the second half of the 18th century, Spanish colonists seized vast lands along the coast of the Pacific Ocean and began to forcibly convert the Indians to Christians. At the age of 30 XIX century in the east of the United States became interested in a fertile country that lay west of the Mississippi River, and resettlement parties rushed there. As a result of the war, California became part of the Mexican Republic. In June 1846, American settlers rebelled against Mexican rule and proclaimed the "Republic of the Star and the Bear." This was the beginning of the creation of the first state of America in the west of the country, North of San Francisco was a Russian colony called Fort Ross. It was founded as a result of the discovery of Alaska by Bering and Chirikov. Due to the lack of support from the Russian government, Fort Ross was sold in 1842 to an enterprising Mexican named Sutter. He began to build a sawmill, and his worker, deepening the riverbed, 45 miles from Fort Ross, stumbled upon the mysterious yellow grains.

The news of the gold struck the small town of San Francisco, and then all of California. Craftsmen, farmers, teachers, lawyers, sailors, leaving their trade, rushed to the west - with picks, shovels and ladles for washing gold. On the way from east to west there were waterless deserts, dangerous mountain crossings, meetings with Indians. But nothing could stop the movement for gold. In the snows of the Sierra Nevada, a stranded party of gold miners in desperation reached the point of cannibalism. And soon on the way of new parties there were already mounds with darkening crosses - one and a half thousand silent graves. To the north and southeast of San Francisco, mining camps and towns with witty names arose: I bet, Donkey Hollow, Gallows City, Gomorrah and others. Fights, stabbings, murders were common, and everyone had revolvers and long knives hanging from their belts. The miners preferred gambling houses and drinking saloons to prayers. Life here was harsh, and life was dangerous. Very few people managed to get rich. And yet it was easier to breathe here than in the old states.

In 1854, 17-year-old Francis Bret Hart found himself in one of these villages and spent six years here in California. He was a schoolteacher, a miner, a druggist, a postman, a compositor, and finally an assistant newspaper editor in the mining town of Uniontown. He survived the illusions of success and the bitterness of disappointment of the prospector, the dangerous romance of the courier of the post stagecoach, he witnessed the terrible massacre of the Indians committed in the city by the townsfolk. He spoke in the newspaper in defense of the Indians and denounced the killers, as a result of which his life was in danger, and he left for San Francisco. The vast material of impressions turned out to be more valuable than the gold of California.

Here in San Francisco, having become a professional journalist, Bret Hart begins to print the first California stories, having pioneered a new topic. He meets with prominent figures in the abolitionist movement (movement to abolish slavery), fights for the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, writes poetry in support of the North against the slave-owning South. Together with a group of literary and artistic youth, he publishes the magazine "California", supports the young Mark Twain. While Bret Hart is better known as a witty master of parodies of the luminaries of American and European literature: Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Cooper. His "Novels condensed" are resourceful and witty. Writers get it for sugary sentimentalism, and for the pomposity of style, and for the fussiness of descriptions, and for melodramatism. Bret Hart goes through the school of literary skill in this way. But the story “The Happiness of the Roaring Camp” (1868) brings him fame, and then a collection of prospecting stories with the same name.

A new world has opened before the reader - the world of gold diggers, miners, various renegades, the life of artisanal villages. Bret Hart did not seek to solve major social problems. The humanism of his stories lies in the fact that he showed California life full of mortal danger, rampant lawlessness and, as it were, warned Americans against the naive belief that here, in California, the poor are turning into the rich. The life of a prospector was harsh and physically difficult. Work went on from early morning until late at night. Gold miners huddled in dugouts, huts, tents. The food was coarse and monotonous. There was no medicine, and diseases carried away even strong people. In contrast to the official press, which sought to present the campaign for gold as a heroic epic, and to blame all the ailments of the prospectors on the "scum of society", the writer did not become a singer of the "golden campaign", but showed the "outcasts" as real people. Under the rough exterior, he saw disinterestedness, kindness of the heart and high nobility.

A riotous and drunken miners' village raises an orphan with motherly tenderness ("Happiness of the Roaring Camp"). During an unexpected flood, Kentucky sacrifices her life to save a baby, in the novel "Mliss" a cheerful beauty from the mines turns out to be an example of spiritual purity and moral dedication. She gives everything for a paralyzed former lover. A reckless player in "Brown from Calaveras" in the name of family happiness of a friend refuses the woman he loves. The friendship of miners is one of the brightest human manifestations, especially in harsh circumstances. In The Tennessee Companion, the prospector is chivalrously devoted to his dissolute companion, disinterested and noble in caring for a friend. As a humanist Democrat, Bret Harte argued that "virtue has left the palaces of the rich and lives in the shacks of the working people."

Bret Garth loves an adventurous plot, romantically effective descriptions of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, snow avalanches and other natural disasters. His stories are sometimes grotesque. Here is the old man Plunket, a favorite of the miners of Monte Flat, created a legend about his daughter - a beauty and a clever girl. He has become so accustomed to this fiction for ten years that the sudden appearance of an unsightly "beauty" plunges the old man into despair and takes his life ("Monte Flat Pastoral").

Two fellow miners had an argument in a hut over breakfast. The quarrel develops into a bloody vendetta, into a long-term legal battle. Dying, one of the miners, Scott, returning to the cause of the quarrel, says: "Old man, but then you shifted the soda into cakes." This ridiculous reason for the quarrel reveals the tragic and tragicomic paradoxes of the human heart as a reflection of the paradoxes of American gold rush life itself. An entire nation has gone berserk in pursuit of a get-rich-quick chimera. In an atmosphere of gold-digging competition, it was not surprising to lose true human values. And if the heroes are aware of their weaknesses and forgive each other's insults, this is their moral victory. The pernicious power of gold was depicted by Bret Hart in the novels "The Millionaire from Quick Mist", "The Man from Solano" and in the novel "Gabriel Con-roy". The denunciation of racism is given in the novels "Wan-Li-Pagan", "Three Tramps from Trinidad".

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, having read the stories of Francis Bret Hart in a distant Siberian exile, was delighted with the "powerful natural mind", "noble soul" and "noble concept of things" of the American novelist. Dickens called Garth's stories "a true work of art" and invited him to England.

Honesty, dignity, selflessness, readiness for self-sacrifice - the writer opposes these riches of ordinary people to the acquisitiveness, selfishness and vulgarity of the rich. Meanwhile, American pragmatic society did not sympathize with such an antithesis. And the story "The Happiness of the Roaring Camp" was called in America "indecent, anti-religious, immoral." Many in the United States have long considered Bret Hart a strange and strange writer, a "bad American."

Meanwhile, his worldwide fame grew, his stories were translated into many languages. The theme opened by Bret Hart is picked up by Mark Twain. Bret Garth moves to Boston and then to New York, the center of American intellectual life. Very soon it is time for failures and material deprivation. Lack of money brings the writer to despair, and in 1878 he accepts a modest offer to become a commercial agent in the provincial German town of Krefeld, then he became consul in Glasgow.

The American press continues to hate the writer. He did not return to his homeland, becoming a voluntary exile. Settling in England, Bret Harte writes: "I love my homeland, but it does not love me enough to give me shelter and let me feed on its pen." The writer is getting old, but he continues to release a small volume of his works every year.

Responding to critics who accused his work of immorality, Bret Harte, with his usual humor, writes in 1889 about the heroine of his story Cressy: “Whatever you do, my characters do not want to behave as they should. No matter how much I explain to them what a virtuous reader expects from them, they do not pay any attention to me. Even Cressy—and how I coddled her! - disappeared at the last moment from the pages of my story with a man with whom I barely had time to introduce her.

The stories The Steppe Foundling (1891), Susie (1893) and Clarence (1895) form a trilogy. This is the story of Clarence Brant's life from his relocation as a boy in the party in California to his service as an officer in the army of the northerners, a convinced and active fighter against the slave-owning South.

The writer wanted to remind his compatriots of the recent heroic time of the civil war, to explain to them "what is truly great and strong in their history." The most successful in the trilogy is the story "The Steppe Foundling" - "a chronicle of the childhood years of Clarence Brant", a courageous teenager, independent and proud, who knows how to love and do good. The misadventures of the boy crossing the Great Prairie on his way to the west reflected the author's personal impressions, his excellent knowledge of the places, life and character of the miners.

The new American generation of writers, who came out mainly from the popular strata, sees Bret Garth as one of their mentors and appreciates his contribution to American literature in a new way.

Bret Hart's stories, poems and ballads, the novels "Gabriel Conroy", the stories "Cressy", "The Steppe Foundling", "Susie", "Clarence" have been translated into Russian. It is interesting for the Russian reader to know that in one of his ballads, "Concepción de Arguello", Bret Hart spoke about the Russian diplomat Count Rezanov, who arrived in San Francisco for important state negotiations with the Spanish authorities and fell in love with the daughter of the commandant of the fortress - young Conchita. Rezanov was an educated and far-sighted ambassador, he saw the benefit of the Russian state in the possession of the "best ridge of the earth" and lamented the indifference of the Russian government to the position of the Russian colony. He intended, upon his return to California with an agreement signed by the sovereign, to marry the daughter of the commandant. But on the way to Russia, he dies. Finish, without waiting for her lover, she goes to the monastery. Only 40 years later she learns about the death of Rezanov. In our time, this romantic story was resurrected by the Lenkom Theater in the play Juno and Avos.

, Albany, New York, USA - May 5, 1902 , Camberley (English), Surrey, England) is an American novelist and poet who became famous for his realistic descriptions of the life of gold prospectors in California.

Francis Brett Garth was born August 25, 1836 in Albany, New York, where his father was a college Greek teacher. He got his name in honor of his great-grandfather - Francis Brett ( Francis Brett). Father eventually changed his surname from Hart on the Harte, and Francis Brett Garth himself preferred the middle name, which he shortened to Bret.

His father died early, the future writer had to earn a living himself, and in 1854, shortly after the start of the "gold rush", he moved to California, where he tried many professions.

Bret Hart published his first stories in 1856 in The Californian, which he edited himself. Later he also published The Overland Monthly (-), the first significant magazine in the western states of America. In the 1870s, already a well-known writer, Garth lived in New York, and then - partly for material reasons, partly due to the aggravated conflict with the American public, caused by the rigidity and intransigence of the writer's civic position - he left for Europe: he was an American consul in the Prussian city of Krefeld, then in Glasgow. He spent the rest of his life in England.

Bret Garth owns the novel "Gabriel Conroy", a number of stories, of which the most famous is the later trilogy "The Steppe Foundling", "Susie" and "Clarence" (the action takes place during the American Civil War), original poems, popular literary parodies in their time (on Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Victor Hugo, etc.) and even a play co-written with Mark Twain. However, stories brought him the greatest popularity, and in stories - images of ordinary people of the Wild West, especially girlish and female ones.

Three stories by Garth form a trilogy, in the center of which is the life story of the protagonist of all three books - Clarence Brant. The Waif of the Plains came out as a separate edition in 1891; "Susy" ("Susy") - in 1893; "Clarence" ("Clarence") - in 1895.

Of historical interest is Garth's recreation of the social situation in California and the activities of supporters of the South based on personal recollections. "Clarence" can be seen as a protest against the oblivion in the United States of the progressive, liberation traditions of the Civil War. Shortly after the release of the final part of the trilogy, Bret Hart, in a letter to a friend, says that he wrote this book as "an American for Americans" to explain to his compatriots "what is truly great and powerful in their history."

Bret Harth's wide fame extended not only to the United States, but also to Europe, where Dickens and the young Kipling admired his prose. Early enough, Garth's works penetrated into Russia (the first publication in 1872), where one of his first translators was Chernyshevsky, who was serving a Yakut exile. In 1873, several short stories and essays by Garth about Californian life were published in Russian in the journal Vestnik Evropy. Noting Hart's humanism, Chernyshevsky wrote: "The strength of Bret Hart is that, for all his shortcomings, he is a man with a very powerful natural mind, a man of an unusually noble soul ...". The social-democratic journal Pravda noted that “Bret Hart immediately became the darling of the Russian public. It was read and loved by people of the most diverse camps. It was translated by both Otechestvennye Zapiski and Russkiy Vestnik; collections of his stories appeared on the book market every now and then; he was published for intelligent readers, for the people they published a cheap edition of his works. Garth has earned good reviews from such Russian literary authorities as

More than a century has passed since the death of the famous prose writer Bret Garth. But his works, written in the 60-70s of the XIX century, are still of value to society around the world.

Famous facts from the biography of the American writer

Francis Bret Harte was born on August 25, 1836 in Albany, New York, a famous writer of realistic prose and poetry. He was named after his grandfather. Francis' father worked as a Greek teacher at the institute. From an early age, Bret Hart loved to read books. He was fond of the works of such authors as Shakespeare, Dumas, Dickens, which undoubtedly influenced his work.

In 1845, when the boy was only 9 years old, his father died. The family experienced financial difficulties, which led to frequent changes of residence. The prose writer studied at school until the age of 13, and then got a job as a clerk to earn a living on his own and help his relatives.

His mother remarried, in 1854 Bret Hart moved to live with her in San Francisco, California, where the gold rush boom began. In this city, the writer had to earn extra money as a teacher and a pharmacist, a courier and a newspaperman. He was also an educator in private homes, a reporter and a gold digger.

The beginning of the literary path

Working in San Francisco for The Californian allowed Bret to publish his stories for the first time in 1856. Two years later, he leaves for Uniontown in search of a better life, gets a job as a reporter for the Northern Californian. But the American prose writer did not stay long in this city. He had to return to San Francisco already in 1860, due to a scandalous publication in a magazine about the murder of more than 50 Indians near the Mud River.

Upon arrival in California, the writer began to work in the newspaper "Golden Era" as a typesetter, and sometimes he was allowed to write his notes. So, under the articles of the prose writer, a signature began to appear - Bret Hart.

For three years, the writer was engaged in the publication of the most significant magazine in the early 70s of Western America, The Overland Monthly ("Overland Monthly"), after which he earned fame. In 1871 Hart Bret left California forever. He goes on tour in Eastern America and Canada. During the journey, he gives lectures, the basis of which are the problems of the Californian state.

In the end, at the age of forty-two, Bret Hart leaves the United States and moves to Europe. The writer tried himself as an American consul in Germany and Great Britain - in the cities of Krefeld and Glasgow. On May 5, 1902, at the age of 66, Hart Bret died in London.

First fame

It was the "California stories" that brought worldwide fame to the American writer Francis Bret Hart. He devoted his whole life to realistic writings. The prose writer relied on accurate facts, which attracted wide public attention to his work.

Living in San Francisco, Bret Hart, whose books are of incredible value to this day, wrote his best works. In 1870 he published a collection entitled "The Happiness of the Roaring Camp". This book contains such stories: "Mliss", "Exiles of Poker Flat", "Pagan Wang Li". The characters used in the novels were not fictitious and idealized. The writer reflected all the facts from the real life of Americans during the gold rush in California.

Works that are not successful

From the time Bret Hart left California, he began to experience acute But, being in a foreign land, the writer did not have access to the necessary materials for his works. One of the best late novels of the prose writer is Gabriel Conroy, written in 1876. This collection includes such stories as "Clarence", "The Steppe Foundling" and "Susie". During this period, Garth released the play "Two from Sandy Bar". Together with Mark Twain, he wrote the essay "A Sin". These works were not successful.

Recent praises of the American writer have turned into vicious criticism. His friend Mark Twain said: "Cheerful and cheerful Bret Harte died in San Francisco!" Since 1878, the author of "California Tales of the Gold Diggers" experienced a mental and financial crisis. He continued to work in Europe, not paying attention to the deterioration of health, but he could not achieve early success.

Notable works

Many of Garth's short stories have become textbooks. He is the author of such books: "Three Tramps from Trinidad", "The Discovery in the Blazing Star", "Esmeralda of the Rocky Canyon. Stories".

But the first fame and glory to the writer was brought by the story "Happiness of the Roaring Camp", which became popular not only in America, but also far beyond its borders. In his work, Bret Hart described a sentimental story that took place in one of the villages of California among gold diggers. It tells about how even riotous residents of the village and drunkards took care of the baby, who was left an orphan.

For a long time, because of this story, the American society called Bret Garth a writer of a foreign country, a "bad American." But his works with incredible speed became popular in Europe, they were translated into many languages ​​of the world.

 

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