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The outcasts of poker flat
The outcasts of poker flat
The outcasts of poker flat
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“The Outcasts of Poker Flat” by Bret Harte Bret Harte, the author of the “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”, was a great American author and poet. He is best remembered for his revolutionary life in California. These people, the people with the traditional western US built him the first traditional western writer to win international popularity. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat “reflects the western attitude of his time”. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” remains an essential bit of American literature and one of the best stories of the unpleasant and -tumble days in California Gold Rush in his use of western setting and local color. The simplicity of this story is a result of the easy transformation of such characters as the “Duchess” a prostitute who reveals “hearts of gold” “The Mother Ship ton”old reprobate who gives up her food, and thus her life, so the innocent piney woods can live. The Uncle Billy, a town drunkard and suspected thief. The familiarities of many of Harte’s characterizations, the quick witted gambler or the prostitute with the heart of gold- attest to the durability of his impact on popular culture. Harte initially traveled to the American west in 1854 and was advantage positioned to observe one of the key occasions of the nineteenth century, the California Gold Rush. “The …show more content…
The story describes that “This fact he pointed out to his companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of “throwing up their hand before the game was played out”’ (488). Although he stoically accepts his fate throughout the story and reveals his basically noble nature, at the tale’s conclusion he takes his own life rather than await death by freezing and starvation. Thus he is called strongest or the weakest of the outcasts of poker
The authors of “Klondike Gold Rush” by Gordon Stables and A Woman Who Went to Alaska by Meg Kellogg Sullivan are discussing the same topic but are using different points of view. Each person’s point of view shapes the reader’s understanding of the miners’ lives.
One example to depict Los Angeles as a frontier town is how “Other sidewalk booths, like those ordinarily used as dispensaries of hot doughnuts and coffee, offered wild-cat mining shares, oil stock and real estate in some highly speculative suburb” (29). This shows the developmental activity in Los Angeles due to the real estate, the oil stock, and the wild-cat mining shares. Many people come to Los Angeles hoping to become rich and strike gold. Los Angeles is a frontier town that has a plethora of oil. In Adamic’s “Laughing in the Jungle,” he characterizes some of LA’s citizens as seeing “a tremendous opportunity to enrich themselves beyond anything they could have hoped for ten or even five years ago, and they mean to make the most of it” (52). This characterization of LA’s citizens is another way of Adamic depicting LA as a frontier town due to the exploitative activity that he describes. Another example of how Adamic portrays LA as a frontier town is because “Los Angeles is America. A jungle. Los Angeles grew up, suddenly, planlessly, under the stimuli of the adventurous spirit of millions of people and the profit motive” (54). Adamic clearly depicts the exploitative activity associated with LA as a frontier town. Another author who illustrates the exploitative activity to establish LA as a frontier town is Upton Sinclair. In
In the small, desolate town of Starkfield, Massachusetts, Ethan Frome lives a life of poverty. Not only does he live hopelessly, but “he was a prisoner for life” to the economy (Ammons 2). A young engineer from outside of town narrates the beginning of the story. He develops a curiosity towards Ethan Frome and the smash-up that he hears about in bits and pieces. Later, due to a terrible winter storm that caused the snow itself to seem like “a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer” (Wharton 20), the narrator is forced to stay the night at Frome’s. As he enters the unfamiliar house, the story flashes back twenty-four years to Ethan Frome’s young life. Living out his life with Zenobia Frome, his hypochondriac of a wife whom he does not love, Ethan has nowhere to turn for a glance at happiness. But when Zenobia’s, or Zeena’s, young cousin, Mattie Silver, comes to care for her, Ethan falls in love with the young aid. Mattie is Ethan’s sole light in life and “she is in contrast to everything in Starkfield; her feelings bubble near the surface” (Bernard 2). All through the novella, the two young lovers hide their feelings towards each other. When they finally let out their true emotions to each other in the end, the consequence is an unforeseen one. Throughout Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton portrays a twisted fairy tale similar to the story of Snow White with the traditional characters, but without a happy ending to show that in a bleak and stark reality, the beautiful and enchanting maiden could become the witch.
Local color is the main theme of Harte’s work. “In fact- and it is a fact characteristic of Bret Harte,- the only satire pure and simple, in his works is that which he directs against hypocrisy.” (Merwin, 4) He shows that society, as well as its citizens, can overcome their trials in life
Rylant juxtaposes Ginny’s poor family, living on a salary that can only be secured within the harsh, unrelenting working conditions of an industrial mill, against John’s family who is oblivious to the fear of poverty or hunger. In this juxtaposition, contemporary issues of economic privilege and workers rights influence the budding war-time romance of John and Ginny, and to us, the audience, peering in at them. By gradually magnifying John’s discomfort in entering Ginny’s “tattered neighborhood,” Rylant reveals the historical extraordinariness of wealth amidst squalor in the city of Pittsburgh. “Mills were fed coal and men so Pittsburgh might live,” and Ginny’s father gives his life to the mill so his family might live, albeit in the walls of this tiny rented apartment (Rylant 2). Both historically realistic and entirely fictitious, Rylant’s characters break the “single perspective” of history texts, fleshing out facts with their own stories, and marking our modern time with their experiences (Jacobs and Tunnell 117).
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
Baym, N. (2008). Cotton mather. In N. Baym (Ed.), The Norton Anthology of American Literature Volume 1 (p. 143). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Locklin, Gerald. "The Day of the Painter, the Death of the Cock: Nathaniel West's Hollywood Novel." Los Angeles in Fiction. A Collection of Original Essays. Ed. David Fine. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.
For a country girl traveling to the city, the cheapest, and slowest, form of travel was the wagon. For a mere "shilling a day, which meant a halfpenny a mile," she might even have the luxury of lying in the soft straw. Nights however might also have to be spent either in the wagon or in a bam along the way since no respectable inn would lodge someone who rode in a wagon (George, Hogarth 51 ) . Not nearly so comfortable, but much more dignified, was the stage coach. ...
...thern Literary Journal. Published by: University of North Carolina Press. Vol. 4, No. 2 (spring, 1972), pp. 128-132.
The "Hills Like White Elephants." In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al.
The final, and mostimportant, literary aspect is that of temporal relations. McPhee uses thisaspect todraw comparisons between the former state of Atlantic City andthe presentstate of the area. The historical facts and stories have basicallyno relevanceto the game of Monopoly and serve only to enhance the overallpurpose of theessay which is that of the city. Although the story CharlesDarrow does providesome history of the game of Monopoly, in the end thishistorical fact is usedto support the contrast between the old and presentcity. In the old city,a simple plumber like Darrow had a chance to oneday have his bust in frontof the bank. In today’s Atlantic city, however,the people carry a senseof hopelessness in that this is not possible.
Harte ventured to California in 1854, briefly worked in mining, but later decided to become a writer. He flourished here, he said. According to Hurtado, “gold-rush stories like “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “Outcasts of Poker Flat” were best – sellers that brought Harte to the favorable attention of eastern critics as well as western readers” (Hurtado, 137). Mark Twain ventured to California in 1861 where he continued his journalistic career. He wrote about the women’s attire.
I read the book Lonesome Howl, which is a drama book and a love story. The book was about two main character whose names are Jake and Lucy. They lived with their family in two different farms, but in the same community besides a mountain covered in a big wicked forest where many rumors took place. The farmers around the place lost many sheep’s since a feral beast. It was a quite small community and a lot of tales was told about it to make it even more interesting. Lucy was 16 years old and lived with her strict father and a coward of mom who didn’t dare to stand up for her daughter when she were being mistreated and slapped around by her father. Lucy was a retired and quite teenager because of that. She had a younger brother whose name was Peter. Peter was being bullied in school and couldn’t read since the education of Peter was different compare too Lucy’s. She helped him in school and stood up for the mean bullies, although all she got in return was him talking bullshit about her with their cruel dad which resulted with her getting thrash.
The setting for this novel was a constantly shifting one. Taking place during what seems to be the Late Industrial Revolution and the high of the British Empire, the era is portrayed amongst influential Englishmen, the value of the pound, the presence of steamers, railroads, ferries, and a European globe.