He was determined to pursue his literary career and traveled back East with his family in 1871 to New York and eventually to Boston, where he contracted with the publisher of "The Atlantic Monthly" for an annual salary of $10,000, "an unprecedented sum at the time". His popularity waned, however, and by the end of 1872, he was without a publishing contract and increasingly desperate. He spent the next few years struggling to publish new work or republish old, and delivering lectures about the gold rush. The winter of 1877–1878 was particularly hard for Harte and his family. He later recalled it as a "hand-to-mouth life" and wrote to his wife Anna, "I don't know—looking back—what ever kept me from going down, in "every way", during that awful December and January".