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Irony lost. Bret Harte's Heathen Chinee and the popularization of the comic coolie as trickster in frontier melodrama.(Critical essay)

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From: Theatre History Studies
Date: 20060101
Author:Romeo, Jacqueline

"Plain Language from Truthful James" was by its author's own account "the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote." (1) Bret Harte readily admitted that the poems publication in the September 1870 issue of Overland Monthly was mere happenstance. (2) He needed to fill the pages of the already slim edition. Regardless of his intentions, the poem "was as nearly an overnight sensation as was possible in the days when San Francisco was four or five days distance from New York via transcontinental railroad," forever fixing in every Euro-American's mind the ...

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