American Literature
his publisher William Dean Howells was not impressed. And his readers were turning elsewhere. After moving to his native New York to write
freelance, his novel Gabriel Conroy (1876) and his collaboration with Mark Twain on the play Ah Sin (1878) proved unsuccessful in providing
adequate income for the Harte family. He and Twain quarrelled bitterly amid rumours of his belligerence, spendthrift habits, drinking, and
womanising which would haunt him for years to come. Harte had mastered the genre of gold rush fiction, capturing the corruption and greed in
nostalgic prose, with vivid descriptions of the myriad characters he had known and the wild new frontier lands he had traversed. However he would
never quite maintain the impetus of his first published successes. His financial stresses took a turn for the better when in 1878 he was
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