Excelsior

Harte, Bret, 1836-1902Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.5

Word count: 2.5K words
Chapters: 1

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Excelsior by Bret HarteAuthor: Harte, Bret, 1836-1902,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Dec 24, 2007

Editor's review

Bret Harte's Excelsior is a compact tale, marked by his signature Western narrative manner and understated moral concern. Built around the gap between ideals and reality, it is spare in language yet resonant in meaning, and serves well as an introduction to the nineteenth-century American short story. This electronic edition comes from Project Gutenberg, with clear formatting and easy searching; readers can finish it on a commute or before sleep. For students of English literature it is good material for observing how Harte handles serious themes with a light touch; for general readers, it is a small story that rewards reflection. Read it once through for the rhythm of the telling, then return to key passages to appreciate the measure of the wording.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who want to get acquainted with nineteenth-century American literary style through a short story
Office workers who need a complete English story in fragmented time
Lower-year English majors doing extracurricular extensive reading and language training
General readers interested in Western themes and moral fables

Not a good fit for

Readers who prefer long, complex plots and multi-stranded narratives
Those hoping for detailed research into the historical background of the West
Beginners still at the起步 stage of English reading who need annotation support

Reading tips

Read straight through first without looking up words, grasping the movement of the story and the characters' motives.
On a second pass, mark recurring images and keywords and sense the author's hints.
After reading, retell the plot in your own words to test whether you have truly understood it.
If using it for class discussion, prepare two or three questions around the conflict between ideals and reality.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this story suitable for English beginners?

Not really for readers starting from zero. Harte's prose is not long, but the diction carries a nineteenth-century literary coloring and the sentences are not all of the simplest structure. Those with intermediate reading ability will find it smoother; beginners would do best with an annotated or guided edition, learning the background before entering the text.

Where does the electronic edition come from, and what should readers note?

This edition is released by Project Gutenberg and is a public-domain e-book. The formatting is mainly plain text; readers are advised to use a reader that supports font adjustment and to pay attention to paragraph breaks. When quoting, rely on the main text rather than the classification information in the introduction to judge the content.

What can I read after finishing this?

You can go on to other short stories by Harte and compare how he handles similar themes differently; you can also set them against American short stories of the same period and observe differences in narrative perspective and endings. This turns a single reading into a small thematic study.

Comments

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About the author

Harte, Bret, 1836-1902 Author

Bret Harte (1836-1902) was an American writer best known for his stories of life during the California Gold Rush. He portrayed the varied characters of mining towns with a style that blends humor, sentiment, and realism, often using unexpected turns to reveal both the warmth and the absurdity of human nature. The collection here includes sixty-three of his works, among them The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales, Tennessee's Partner, Frontier Stories, Selected Stories of Bret Harte, East and West: Poems, Salomy Jane, and the Complete Poetical Works, covering both short fiction and poetry. These works draw largely on the everyday life and legends of the western frontier and have influenced later American Western literature. Public information on his life and education is limited, so no conjecture is offered here.