Cressy
by Bret Harte
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Bret Harte achieved acclaim as one of the first writers to craft a compelling literature grounded in the unique culture of the American West. The heroine of his novel Cressy is a Western girl through and through. Readers won't soon forget this indelibly drawn character..
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A young man follows the Gold Rush to California. When the expected fortune fails to materialize, he drifts to a small town somewhere in the state which is apparently populated by hillbillies who speak in dialect. There he takes on the role of schoolmaster. Cressy is a 16 year old girl/woman who returns to the school tricked out in town clothes from Sacramento after breaking her engagement. She is a vacuous individual. Her father is a shrewd oaf in search of "kam" (he pronounces "calm" the Scots way) and her mother, described as man-like, has few thoughts in her head beyond vendettas. The schoolmaster is baffled by the whole thing. Cressy's extreme vapidity made me fear that it was contagious; just reading her dialogue, I felt my brains show more try to leak out my ears. I did not finish the book. show less
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Bret Harte's birth year is variously given as 1836 and 1839, and his tombstone bears the date 1837. He is remembered especially for his two short stories, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868) and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1870), both achievements in local color. The former is the story of an orphaned baby adopted by the men in a gold-rush-era show more mining camp; it was dramatized by Dion Boucicault in 1894. The latter is a tale about four undesirables expelled from a mining camp and their losing battle against a blizzard. Although he was born in the East and lived there and in Europe most of his life, Harte's 17 years of residence in California have associated him most closely with that state, and the scenes of all his successful stories are set in the West. His contemporary sketches of life in San Francisco during the 1860s, written with Mark Twain, were first collected in book form as Sketches of the Sixties (1926). When he went east again to settle in Boston in 1871, his talent seems to have deserted him. Much of his later life was spent in England. Today, his formerly out-of-print stories are available in reprint versions from Ayer Publishers. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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