In the August, 1868, issue of the San Francisco-based literary journal The Overland Monthly, a brief review of the pulpy latest by the popular writer John Esten Cooke opened with this pronouncement: “The great North American novelist has not yet appeared. Whether he be hidden in the womb of time, or now develops his budding talent in the weekly newspapers, we cannot say. It is tolerably certain, however, that it is not John Esten Cooke.”

This piece was unsigned, but it is very likely that its author was Bret Harte, The Overland Monthly’s prolific editor-in-chief, and the complicated co-star of Ben Tarnoff’s new literary history, “The Bohemians.” Harte was thirty-one and already the most famous man of letters in California when he took the journal’s helm. He intended it to be the preëminent platform for a rejuvenated style of writing that would draw from the pioneer spirit of the West and, Tarnoff writes, “cast off the lingering influence of the Old World.” Cooke’s novel, a chivalric romance set in the antebellum South, was a perfect target for Harte’s urbane sarcasm. Recycling James Fenimore Cooper, who himself had recycled Sir Walter Scott, the book had “no confidence whatever in what our people delight to call ‘American Institutions,’ ” but was “fain to transplant the manners and customs of boar-hunting, ale-swilling, swearing Medieval England to Old Virginia.” It was stale European entertainment dished out to an American audience hungry for a literature of its own.

Manners and customs imported from a mythical Agincourt were easy enough to mock. Much more difficult to shake, however, was the influence of New England, where perfect English flowed from the nibs of bearded eminences like James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and where every hopeful writer was obliged to make pilgrimage. If you wanted to be anyone, you had to be endorsed by James T. Fields’s Atlantic Monthly, the nation’s final arbiter of literary taste. Emerson may have mused that the future of American writing lay in a “rank-rabble party” that would “root out the hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way,” but for most of his life the patricians remained comfortably in control.

It was during the Civil War when people like Harte—who had moved to San Francisco from New York in 1853—began to sense some depreciation in the Boston Brahmins’ intellectual currency. The war was profitable for California, and in San Francisco a development boom overlapped with a sudden influx of young men escaping enlistment. Tarnoff provides a fascinating snapshot of the era, when the city’s prosperity and unique international character (he points out that in 1860 almost two-thirds of the city’s adult males were foreign-born) brought about a thrilling, if chaotic, admixture of idealism and fun. He quotes the popular minister Thomas Starr King—a former Bostonian and an Emerson acolyte who brought the gospel of transcendentalism to the Far West—exhorting Californians to draw from the purity of their natural surroundings and achieve a moral rebirth from the carnage and race hatred that defined the war. Harte had his utopianism in mind when, in an 1860 newspaper column, he dubbed himself and like-minded artists “Bohemians.” The label, Tarnoff writes, was meant to evoke more than a class of Byronic rebels skulking on the fringes of respectable society: “It came to represent a creative alternative to the mundane and the mercenary in American life, a way to overcome California’s crude materialism and fulfill Thomas Starr King’s call to build Yosemites in the soul.”

“The Bohemians” also makes time for two little-known writers who joined Harte’s circle and followed him to The Overland Monthly as editors and contributors. Charles Warren Stoddard was a gentle and boyish-looking closeted homosexual (a word, Tarnoff reminds us, that didn’t appear in print until 1869) who wrote newspaper columns and poetry but had his biggest success with sentimental travel sketches about Hawaii and Polynesia. Ina Coolbrith came to the city from Los Angeles following an ugly divorce and the death of a child. In San Francisco, she began publishing poetry and hosting salons, finding in Harte a friend and an enthusiastic champion. Tarnoff at times seems constrained to make more of the literary significance of Stoddard and Coolbrith than their writing merits, but there is a lovely symmetry between their biographies and the heyday of early Western letters. These two writers, who had so often felt depressed and creatively stifled, enjoyed their freest, happiest years as bustling members of what they and Harte dubbed the Overland Trinity. If they didn’t reinvent American writing, the magazine allowed them to reinvent their lives.

But then, Bret Harte didn’t reinvent American writing either, and the drama and pathos of “The Bohemians” is in watching him get overtaken and then thoroughly surpassed by another writer who would accomplish exactly what he had dreamed for himself: conquering the East with storytelling materials mined from the West.

It was, of course, Mark Twain who ended up doing it. Twain earned local notoriety cranking out newspaper columns in Nevada and San Francisco (often for Harte, whom he had befriended), but in 1865 he had his nationwide breakthrough. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which Twain had heard improvised by a backwoods forty-niner during a prospecting trip, is a somewhat inexplicable comic anecdote about a man who gets cheated in a bet about his pet frog. But the point of the story is all in the telling. Twain assumes the voice of a grizzled, plausibly drunken old miner who buttonholes an unfortunate visitor and weaves his way through the shaggy-dog tale. Something about the story, Tarnoff writes, “spelled the beginning of the end of the old guard in American letters: the decline of a genteel elite that looked to Europe for its influences and the rise of a literature that drew its inspiration from more native sources.”

What, exactly, had Twain hit on that Harte and the other Bohemians had not? It’s of some regret that Tarnoff’s book excerpts very little of his subjects’ work, making it difficult to envision what his refrain about “a new kind of writing” means. But the texts themselves begin to make things clear. Harte’s most famous story, for instance, was called “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” (It appeared in the same 1868 issue of The Overland Monthly as the hatchet job on Cooke’s novel.) It tells of a camp of miners who adopt the baby of a prostitute after she dies in childbirth. The premise is transgressive, the dialogue crude and colorful (“Ain’t bigger nor a derringer,” a miner says of the baby), but the exposition looks like this: