...and for two decades set the style in short fiction. Bret Harte's , whatever one may think of its merits, must be admitted to be the most influential short story ever written in America. Francis Bret Harte was born in 1839 at Albany, where his father, a scholar and an itinerant teacher of languages, happened at the time to be stationed. A youth of frail physique, he became a precocious reader, prefe...