Bret Harte, in this story, is thematically in the mainstream of American literature. His most famous predecessors and contemporaries dealt with the archetypal theme of society forcing its value system on all its members. The tyranny of the community in punishing those who fail to conform to its narrow standards is illustrated in the works of contemporaries such as Mark Twain, Henry James, and William Dean Howells. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, the most famous precursors of Harte, championed the individual who was wronged by society—Hawthorne most notably in The Scarlet Letter, “The Artist of the Beautiful,” and “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and Melville in Moby Dick (1851) and Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924). Harte moved the setting to the West but continued the literary struggle against local prejudice and the people who organize secret committees as a means of protecting their own interests. The real villains are the ordinary people, not the outcasts, of Poker Flat.