'Two Men of Sandy Bar' is a play written by Bret Harte. The plot unfolds during the Gold Rush. Jack Oakhurst is a gentleman gambler. While playing poker one night, Oakhurst meets fellow gambler Sandy Morton. While the chivalrous Oakhurst is the consummate pro, Sandy Morton is the complete antithesis. Morton has a propensity towards excessive drink and is of low moral character. Despite these differences, they become fast friends.
Although his chief forte was the short story, American author Bret Harte also dabbled in drama from time to time. This play combines elements of several of Harte's short stories, including "The Idyl of Red Gulch" and "Mr. Thompson's Prodigal," into a series of sketches about life in the mining towns of the Old West.
An extraordinary portrait of a fast-changing America—and the Western writers who gave voice to its emerging identity At once an intimate portrait of an unforgettable group of writers and a history of a cultural revolution in America, The Bohemians reveals how a brief moment on the far western frontier changed our culture forever. Beginning with Mark Twain’s arrival in San Francisco in 1863, this group biography introduces readers to the other young eccentric writers seeking to create a new American voice at the country’s edge—literary golden boy Bret Harte; struggling gay poet Charles Warren Stoddard; and beautiful, haunted Ina Coolbrith, poet and protector of the group. Ben Tarnoff’s elegant, atmospheric history reveals how these four pioneering writers helped spread the Bohemian movement throughout the world, transforming American literature along the way. “Tarnoff’s book sings with the humor and expansiveness of his subjects’ prose, capturing the intoxicating atmosphere of possibility that defined, for a time, America’s frontier.” -- The New Yorker “Rich hauls of historical research, deeply excavated but lightly borne.... Mr. Tarnoff’s ultimate thesis is a strong one, strongly expressed: that together these writers ‘helped pry American literature away from its provincial origins in New England and push it into a broader current’.” -- Wall Street Journal
