Mark Twain and Bret Harte
Regional fiction, also called local color, was a popular writing style in the United States in the mid to late nineteenth century. A type of literary realism, local color focused on the voices and customs of the regional U.S.
Mark Twain and Bret Harte are two well remembered regional authors. Twain's stories were often set in his home state of Missouri, while Harte wrote most famously about California. Twain and Harte met, in fact, in Northern California, where Harte lived for nearly twenty years.