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The Luck Of Roaring Camp Analysis

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“The only sure thing about luck is that it will change,” Bret Harte’s life can be described with these eleven words, he lived a life full of ups and downs while cementing his status as an important author in American history. Harte main works came in the realism period where works focused on how life really was and didn 't try to romanticize life. Moving to California during the end period of the gold rush and starting to write during the realist period shaped Harte 's writing into what it would later become. Harte moved to California in 1853 and settled as a miner in Arcata. The way that Harte wrote his dialogue was influenced by the miner dialect he picked up on while living here. After an unsuccessful attempt to live in California he …show more content…

The Feminization of Roaring Camp: Bret Harte and the American Woman 's Home, by Axel Nissen, is a criticism of Harte 's work, The Luck of Roaring Camp. The critic argues, the story serves as a parable, or a story with deeper meaning, the symbolism of Tommy Luck as a Christ-like figure, gives him the ability to transform miners into what everyone sees as a Victorian civilization, but this in turn leads the wilderness wipes them out I agree with Nissen because the the stories plot gives Tommy very Christ-like qualities that can make him have the ability to change the miners way of life to what would seem to be better. “... the father was unknown.” God is the father of Christ, but because no one can see God, it would make it seem like he had no father or that he was unknown, and Tommy had the same “problem.” “ The cabin assigned to “Tommy Luck”- or “The Luck,” as he was more frequently called- first showed signs of improvement. It was kept scrupulously clean and whitewashed. It was then boarded, clothed and papered.” This shows that his presence was enough for these miners to begin improving the way of life around the camp. “There on a blanket spread over pine boughs... Latterly there was a rude attempt to decorate this bower with flowers and sweet smelling shrubs.” The miners are trying to make the camp more modern and clean now that Tommy was

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He portrayed the miners as criminals and people of bad backgrounds who were just trying to make a living or make themselves richer by working in a very unclean camp. However, with the birth of “the luck” or the baby and the miners’ attempt to improve the community, Bret Harte did romanticize it. Phrases such as: “They were flush times, and the luck was with them”, “They’ve got vines and flowers round their houses, and they wash themselves twice a day”, “ They’ve a street up there in ‘Roaring’ that would lay over any street in Red Dog” help the camp seem as a camp that anyone would like to work in even though some of these phrases are over

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Bret Harte was born August 25, 1836, in Albany, Ney York. Bret Harte’s family moved around a lot, so he did not get a very good education. During the frequent moving, he had a lot of time to read. Some of Harte’s favorite authors were Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe. Before he was a writer he was a school teacher, a miner,

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"The Luck of Roaring Camp" is a poignant short story written by Bret Harte, nineteenth-century master of the genre. In this realism tale set during the Californian gold rush era, the author successfully depicts how humanity can be concealed within a squalid and crude world. In it, a new-born child has a civilizing influence on men in more than one way: the tragedy of his birth brings the men together; he has the power to assemble them as a society, a culture. Secondly, the men become more polite, cordial towards one another. Thirdly, they have rites like all societies, giving a meaning to all lives in the camp.

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