For this edition, noted scholar Gary Scharnhorst has selected 259 letters (including 144 that are new to scholarship) from more than 2,000 Bret Harte letters known to exist. Scharnhorst's lively introduction and comprehensive notes give general readers and specialists immediate access to the literary and social milieus in which Harte lived and worked. A painstaking correspondent, Bret Harte created in his letters fascinating vignettes of life on several fronts during the latter half of the nineteenth century - San Francisco's fledgling society of the 1860s, the literary scene in New York and Boston in the 1870s, the Reconstruction South, and the Continent and British Isles through the turn of the twentieth century. As a fiction writer, playwright, and diplomat, Harte knew, sometimes intimately, many of the most prominent women and men of his day, including such writers as Mark Twain and Henry James, such actors as Lawrence Barrett and Annie Russell, and such politicians as John Hay and Herbert Bismarck. This unexpurgated edition of Bret Harte's letters, the first in more than seventy years, chronicles the life of a pioneering western American writer who became a creature of the literary marketplace. Among other life events, the edition details Harte's increasingly troubled relationship with Samuel Clemens and includes all known letters from Harte to Clemens.