1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales

A young girl meets a stranger riding near her parent's ranch, does him a favor, and later comes to believe he may be a Mexican horse thief.  From "Stories of the Early West" by Bret Harte About the author Profile Image for Bret Harte. Bret Harte   Follow People note American writer Francis Bret Harte for The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870), his best-known collection of his stories about California mining towns. People best remember this poet for his short-story fiction, featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the Gold Rush. In a career, spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern United States to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but people most often reprinted, adapted, and admired his tales of the Gold Rush. Parents named him after Francis Brett, his great-grandfather. Bernard Hart, paternal grandfather