This chapter explores how “Bohemia” figured in the early writings and careers of Bret Harte, who wrote under the pseudonym “The Bohemian” in a regular column from 1859 to 1863, and other Golden Era authors such as Mark Twain, dubbed the “Sage-Brush Bohemian.” Harte, San Francisco's first self-declared Bohemian, approached San Franciscan life through the discursive framework of the proverbial Bohemian and Bourgeois conflicts between libertinism and self-denial, culture and society. In his columns, Harte ironized and critiqued the city's emerging commodity culture, questioned bourgeois divisions between the “separate spheres,” and expressed a fascination with such ethnic enclaves (and alternatives to the city's dominant ethos) as Chinatown and the Mexican Quarter. This chapter documents Harte's early life and looks at factors that contributed to his Bohemianism.