The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales With Condensed Novels, Spanish and American Legends, and Earlier Papers

The author's first volume was published in 1865 in a thin book of verse, containing, besides the titular poem, The Lost Galleon, various patriotic contributions to the lyrics of the Civil War, then raging, and certain better known humorous pieces, which have been hitherto interspersed with his later poems in separate volumes, but are now restored to their former companionship. This was followed in 1867 by The Condensed Novels, originally contributed to the San Francisco Californian, a journal then edited by the author, and a number of local sketches entitled Bohemian Papers, making a single not very plethoric volume, the author's first book of prose. But he deems it worthy of consideration that during this period, i.e. from 1862 to 1866, he produced The Society upon the Stanislaus and The Story of M'liss, – the first a dialectical poem, the second a Californian romance, – his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility, – a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better-known pages of The Overland Monthly, he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of The Luck of Roaring Camp and the poem of the "Heathen Chinee