page_title: The Heathen Chinee
section_title: Composition and publication history
hierarchical_section_title: The Heathen Chinee / Composition and publication history
caption_attribution_description: English: American writer Bret Harte in 1871. "From a photograph taken by Sarony, New York, shortly after the publication of 'The Heathen Chinee'" From Human Documents: Portraits and Biographies of Eminent Men. New York: S. S. McClure, Limited, 1895: p. 167
context_page_description: "The Heathen Chinee", originally published as "Plain Language from Truthful James", is a narrative poem by American writer Bret Harte. It was published for the first time in September 1870 in the Overland Monthly. It was written as a parody of Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and satirized anti-Chinese sentiment in northern California.
  The poem became popular and was frequently republished. To Harte's dismay, however, the poem reinforced racism among his readers instead of challenging it as he intended. Nevertheless, he returned to the character years later. The poem also inspired or influenced several adaptations.
context_section_description: Mark Twain later recalled that Harte initially wrote the poem "for his own amusement", without intending to publish it. According to Twain, he "threw it aside, but being one day suddenly called upon for copy he sent that very piece in." In writing the poem, Harte echoed and, therefore, lampooned Algernon Charles Swinburne's 1865 verse tragedy Atalanta in Calydon. Ambrose Bierce claimed Harte originally sent it to him to include in his San Francisco-based News Letter, but he suggested it was better suited for Harte's own journal, the Overland Monthly. It appeared there under its original title, "Plain Language from Truthful James" in the September 1870 issue. Its adapted name, "The Heathen Chinee", (though it echoed Harte's phrases "the heathen Chinee" and "that heathen Chinee" in the poems text) became a title in a republication in a Boston newspaper in 1871.
  The poem was republished several times within a short period, including in New York Evening Post, Prairie Farmer, New York Tribune, Boston Evening Transcript, Providence Journal, Hartford Courant, and Saturday Evening Post (published twice). The poem was also included in a book by Harte titled Poems, released in January 1871. Several periodicals and books would republish the poem with illustrations. 
  In April 1870, James Thomas Fields had published a collection of Harte's stories, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches through the Fields, Osgood, & Co. imprint. After the sudden success of "The Heathen Chinee", Fields rushed a to produce a collection of Harte's poetry in time for the Christmas market. That book sold out of its first six editions in five days.
  The character of Ah Sin was revived for a theatrical play co-written by Harte and Twain, Ah Sin. The two writers had a rift by February 1877 just before completing a final draft. Twain took over the project and, as he wrote to William Dean Howells, he "left hardly a foot-print of Harte in it". Harte nevertheless attended the play's opening at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. on May 7, 1877.
  Near the end of his life, Harte used the characters of both Truthful James and Ah Sin in his poem "Free Silver at Angel's", a satirical response to the silver plank in the 1896 Democratic National Convention platform. Even so, when asked about the original poem in later years, Harte called the poem "trash", and "the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote."
caption: Bret Harte in 1871, about a year after publishing "The Heathen Chinee"
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