Harte: 580 books

The Crusade of the Excelsior is an outstanding parable published in 1887 it demonstrates serious social criticism. It has picturesque setting that helps the reader to comprehend the accurate theme of the story. Moving!

Just where the track of the Los Gatos road streams on and upward like the sinuous trail of a fiery rocket until it is extinguished in the blue shadows of the Coast Range, there is an embayed terrace near the summit, hedged by dwarf firs. At every bend of the heat-laden road the eye rested upon it wistfully;...

Morning was breaking on the high road to San Jose. The long lines of dusty, level track were beginning to extend their vanishing point in the growing light; on either side the awakening fields of wheat and oats were stretching out and broadening to the sky. In the east and south the stars were receding...

They had all known him as a shiftless, worthless creature. From the time he first entered Redwood Camp, carrying his entire effects in a red handkerchief on the end of a long-handled shovel, until he lazily drifted out of it on a plank in the terrible inundation of '56, they never expected anything better...

It was a season of unequalled prosperity in Devil's Ford. The half a dozen cabins scattered along the banks of the North Fork, as if by some overflow of that capricious river, had become augmented during a week of fierce excitement by twenty or thirty others, that were huddled together on the narrow...

In this darkly humorous short story, a miner is subjected to mortifying humiliation in front of the entire camp and takes matters into his own hands to set things right. From a toxic friendship to a marriage that's doomed to fail, "Tennessee's Partner" is a bracing case study of the dark side of human relationships.

The sun was going down on the Carquinez Woods. The few shafts of sunlight that had pierced their pillared gloom were lost in unfathomable depths, or splintered their ineffectual lances on the enormous trunks of the redwoods. For a time the dull red of their vast columns, and the dull red of their...

Tennessee's Partner

Yerba Buena’s guardian is the Mayor. But when he dies, Yerba Buena is unsure if she really is the descendent of an important Spanish family, as her mother told her. When her ward, Paul, begins to fall in love with her, Yerba Buena discovers what her secret may be.

There was no mistake this time: he had struck gold at last! It had lain there before him a moment ago—a misshapen piece of brown-stained quartz, interspersed with dull yellow metal; yielding enough to have allowed the points of his pick to penetrate its honeycombed recesses, yet heavy enough to drop from the point of his pick as he endeavored to lift it from the red earth.

What had been in the cool gray of that summer morning a dewy country lane, marked only by a few wagon tracks that never encroached upon its grassy border, and indented only by the faint footprints of a crossing fox or coon, was now, before high noon, already crushed, beaten down, and trampled out of...

Anita is a wife on the edge. Thanks to her husband Frank's success in business she has lived a lavish lifestyle at the heart of the city's elite. However, now that the economy is in freefall, it seems the days of boozy lunches with 'the girls', glittering charity balls and competitive designer...