The Outcasts of Poker Flat Author:Bret Harte from back cover: "Harte wrote realistically, but his realism is very romatantic. He described imaginative and irresistable characters. He constructed exciting plots, and he sympathized with those people fate singled out to die in snowfalls or floods. Harte in an American Charles Dickens, for he has Dickens' human weakness for dialogue and dialec... more »t. Like Dickens, too, Harte understood and forgave his fellow man. This is why Jack Hamlin, John Oakhurst, Yuba Bill, and dozens of other characters from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, who find themselves living side by side in the California Sierras, are exciting to read about today. It is these people - Bret Harte's creations - who live dangerously in today's wild-West novels and Western films."« less