Francis Bret Harte (1836 - 1902) was an American short-story writer, poet, and humorist. Best remembered for his stories fiction stories concerning the California Gold Rush, featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures. He helped create the American local-colour writing style, which attempted to better represent the particularities of a place and its inhabitants through elements such as dialect, landscape, and folklore. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction.