A collection of eleven stories by Bret Harte.

When the gambler, John Oakhurst, senses that he may have outstayed his welcome in the mining camp of Poker Flat, he sets off to find pastures new. Accompanied by the local drunk, Uncle Billy, and two prostitutes, he makes his way towards Sandy Bar. However, when things do not go according to plan, and the weather turns, Oakhurst must look deep inside himself to work out what to do. A gritty tale, riddled with tragedy and romance, ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’ does not spare the horses when it comes to depicting the difficulties faced by ordinary folk in the Old West. Born in New York, Bret Harte (1836 – 1902) was a prolific poet, author, and journalist. The son of one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange, Harte’s education was erratic, and he left school at the age of 13. Four years later, he moved to California, trying out a number of jobs, including working as a miner and a journalist. After an unsuccessful stint as a stagecoach guard, he became a schoolteacher. Later, he was hired as an editor for ‘The Golden Era’ magazine. His piece on the Wiyot Massacre resulted in death threats, and Harte was forced to flee to San Francisco. There, he became a journalist for ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ and was instrumental in founding ‘The Californian’, and ‘The Overland Monthly’. The latter was to publish one of his most well-known stories, ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches’. During his lifetime, Harte published more than 30 books.

Introduced shortly after the United States declared its independence, poker’s growth and development has paralleled that of America itself. As a gambling game with mass appeal, poker has been played by presidents and peasants, at kitchen tables and final tables, for matchsticks and millions. First came the hands, then came the stories – some true, some pure bluffs, and many in between. In Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America’s Favorite Card Game, Martin Harris shares these stories while chronicling poker’s progress from 19th-century steamboats and saloons to 21st-century virtual tables online, including: Poker on the Mississippi Poker in the Movies Poker in the Old West Poker on the Newsstand Poker in the Civil War Poker in Literature Poker on the Bookshelf Poker in Music Poker in the White House Poker on Television Poker During Wartime Poker on the Computer From Mark Twain to “Dogs Playing Poker” to W.C. Fields to John Wayne to A Streetcar Named Desire to the Cold War to Kenny Rogers to ESPN to Star Trek: The Next Generation and beyond, Poker & Pop Culture provides a comprehensive survey of cultural productions in which poker is of thematic importance, showing how the game’s portrayal in the mainstream has increased poker’s relevance to American history and shaped the way we think about the game and its significance.

The American West of myth and legend has always exerted a strong hold on the popular imagination, and the essays in Reading the West examine some of the basis of that fascination. Reading the West, first published in 1996, is a collection of critical essays by writers, independent scholars and critics on the literature of the American West in the last two centuries. It showcases new ways of reading and understanding western writing. Arguing for the importance of 'place' in literature, these essays explore what makes representative literary works 'western'. They also explore the multicultural and ecological dimensions of western writing. This volume helps enrich our understanding of a distinguished body of literary work which has sometimes been unjustly ignored. It deals not only with literature but with the changing conception of the West in the American imagination.

Bret Harte was the best-known and highest paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the failure of his marriage and, in 1878, his departure for Europe. Gary Scharnhorst’s biography of Harte traces the growing commercial appeal of western fiction and drama on both sides of the Atlantic during the Gilded Age, a development in which Harte played a crucial role. Harte’s pioneering use of California local color in such stories as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" challenged genteel assumptions about western writing and helped open eastern papers to contributions by Mark Twain and others. The popularity of Bret Harte’s writings was driven largely by a literary market that his western stories helped create. The first Harte biography in nearly seventy years to be written entirely from primary sources, this book documents Harte’s personal relationships and, in addition, his negotiations with various publishers, agents, and theatrical producers as he exploited popular interest in the American West.