Bret Harte (1836–1902) was the pen name of Francis Brett Harte, who gave many Easterners their first glimpse of the Old West in his amusing stories, full of local color and characterized by unusual juxtapositions of characters and surprise endings. Though associated with the West, Harte was born in Albany, New York. After his father died, he moved in 1854 to California. There, he married and gathered the material he would later use in his stories, riding shotgun on Wells Fargo stagecoaches and prospecting like so many other Californians during the Gold Rush. Settling in San Francisco, he worked as a typesetter and then as a writer for the Californian. In 1861, he took a job as editor of the Overland Monthly, in which he published the work that would make him famous, including the stories "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," and the poem "Plain Language from Truthful James." Becoming well known in literary circles, he socialized with such San Francisco luminaries as Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain.

Harte's regionalism met with an eager audience back East, so eager that the Atlantic Monthly in Boston offered him the then astronomical sum of ten thousand dollars to write twelve pieces for the magazine. Harte left for Boston, but the pieces that he produced under his contract were mediocre, and his fame subsided. Thereafter, Harte produced several collections of stories, two novels, and two plays, but none equaled his earlier work. He served as a United States diplomat in Prussia and in Scotland and then settled in London, England, where he lived for the rest of his life. Harte is known for his stories about life on America's Western frontier, especially his amusing explorations of the people and the landscape of northern California's High Sierras, the Gold Rush region.