Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Literature of the California Gold Rush - Peter Stoneley (essay date 1996)

Peter Stoneley (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: “Rewriting the Gold Rush: Twain, Harte and Homosociality,” in Journal of American Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1996, pp. 189-209.

[In the following essay, Stoneley focuses on the theme of male-male relationships in the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, illustrating how these gold rush writers reflected the changing nature of homosocial ties in the American West during the mid- to late-nineteenth century.]

For adventurous young men, the experience of the gold rush was one of transformation. The most keenly-sought transformation was from “not wealthy” to “fabulously wealthy,” but the literature, histories and memoirs of the era point toward a much more general sense of change and disorientation. One writer noted of the new arrivals to Sacramento that as “each one steps on shore, he seems to have entered a magic circle, in which he is under the influence of new impulses. The wills of all...

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