Francis Bret Harte wrought a revolution in the art of story-writing by his California tale, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" which appeared in 1868 in the second number of "The Overland Monthly," of which Harte was editor. This was followed by a number of stories of the same original quality, such as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "The Idyl of Red Gulch," concerning which Parke Godwin wrote in "Putnam's Magazine," 1870: "Bret Harte has deepened and broadened our literary and moral sympathies; he has broken the sway of the artificial and conventional; he has substituted actualities for idealities-but actualities that manifest the grandeur of self-sacrifice, the beauty of love, the power of childhood, and the ascendency of nature."
