Book Excerpt: ...s de Gaul. The author has been frequently asked if such and such incidents were real, --if he had ever met such and such characters. To this he must return the one answer, that in only a single instance was he conscious of drawing purely from his imagination and fancy for a character and a logical succession of incidents drawn therefrom. A few weeks after his story was published, he received a letter, authentically signed, correcting some of the minor details of his facts (!), and enclosing as corroborative ...
Read More
Book Excerpt: ...s de Gaul. The author has been frequently asked if such and such incidents were real, --if he had ever met such and such characters. To this he must return the one answer, that in only a single instance was he conscious of drawing purely from his imagination and fancy for a character and a logical succession of incidents drawn therefrom. A few weeks after his story was published, he received a letter, authentically signed, correcting some of the minor details of his facts (!), and enclosing as corroborative evidence a slip from an old newspaper, wherein the main incident of his supposed fanciful creation was recorded with a largeness of statement that far transcended his powers of imagination.He has been repeatedly cautioned, kindly and unkindly, intelligently and unintelligently, against his alleged tendency to confuse recognized standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness, and often criminality, with a single solitary virtue. He might easily show that he has never written a sermoClose..
Read Less
Add this copy of The Luck of Roaring Camp to cart. $10.66, good condition, Sold by Poquette's Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dewitt, MI, UNITED STATES, published 1982 by Jamestown Publishers.
Add this copy of The Luck of Roaring Camp to cart. $39.34, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1982 by Jamestown Publishers.
I always associated Bret Harte with Mark Twain. I don't know why. So I expected this book to be more like the humerous Twain stories that I have read. Wrong ! Bret Harte was a college graduate from the east, that was moved to the west coast by his widowed mother. He became the editor of one paper, then another. His stories, all twenty-three in this book, are centered in the central valley of California where, by the way, I grew up. So it was most interesting to hear about all the floods in and around Sacramento during the time of these stories. Many of the stories sound like they came from one of his editorials in the paper he wrote for. All are realistic, and from the days of the gold rush. The Luck of Roaring Camp is about an orphaned baby of a prostitute in one of the gold camps, and how the miners took over the care of the baby, feeding him milk from a donkey. The camp soon becomes alive with luck, which is attributed to the baby, and hence the baby is called Luck. However, a flood comes along and wipes out the camp and kills many of the miners, including the baby Luck. You see why I said that the stories sound like they came right from his paper. All of the stories are similar. Realistic and brutally of the times.
