California Sketches

by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Howell (Editor)

In the 1860's California was emerging from its rowdy Gold Rush days into a period when, as Bret Harte observed, "fine clothes appeared upon the streets and men swore less frequently." The high spirits of that new age leap to life in these stories, sketches, articles and reviews by Harte and Mark Twain, selected from the archives of The Californian, a leading San Francisco literary journal of the period.

As literary gems and as social history, these 46 selections will delight readers with their humor and earnest desire to get to the heart of things, whether they talk about people, places or books, a major event or an odd turn of events, they provide winning close-ups of early Twain, early Harte, and early California.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1926

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.