Harte's family settled in New York City and Brooklyn in 1845. His education was spotty and irregular, but he inherited a love of books and managed to get some verses published at age 11. In 1854 he left for California and went into mining country on a brief trip that legend has expanded into a lengthy participation in, and intimate knowledge of, camp life. In 1857 he was employed by the Northern Californian, a weekly paper. There his support of Indians and Mexicans proved unpopular; after a massacre of Indians in 1860, which he editorially deplored, he found it advisable to leave town.

Returning to San Francisco, he was married and began to write for the Golden Era, which published the first of his Condensed Novels, brilliant parodies of James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and others. He then became a clerk in the U.S. branch mint, a job that allowed freedom for editorship of the Californian, for which he engaged Mark Twain to write weekly articles.

In 1868, after publishing a series of Spanish legends akin to Washington Irving's Alhambra, he was named editor of the Overland Monthly. For it he wrote “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” Following The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870), he found himself world famous. He furthered his reputation with “Plain Language from Truthful James” (1870), better known as “The Heathen Chinee,” a poem that attracted national attention. On it he based his best play, Ah Sin (1877), a collaboration with Twain.

Flushed with success, Harte in 1871 signed with The Atlantic Monthly for $10,000 for 12 stories a year, the highest figure offered an American writer up to that time. Resigning a professorship at the University of California, Harte left for the East, never to return. In New England he was greeted as an equal by the writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Dean Howells, and was lionized and toasted to the point of spiritual and moral breakdown. With personal and family difficulties, his work slumped. After several years of indifferent success on the lecture circuit, Harte in 1878 accepted consulships in Crefeld, Ger., and later in Glasgow, Scot. In 1885 he retired to London. His wife and family joined him at wide intervals, but he never returned to the United States.

He found in England a ready audience for his tales of a past or mythical California long after American readers had tired of his formula. “Ingénue of the Sierras” and “A Protégée of Jack Hamlin's” (both 1893) are perhaps better than his earlier stories.