Frank Bergon | |
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 Frank Bergon in West Tisbury, 2019 |
Frank Bergon (born 1943) is an American writer whose novels, essays, anthologies, and literary criticism focus primarily on the American West. [1]
Frank Bergon | |
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| Frank Bergon in West Tisbury, 2019 |
Frank Bergon (born 1943) is an American writer whose novels, essays, anthologies, and literary criticism focus primarily on the American West. [1]
Frank Bergon was born in Ely, Nevada, and grew up on a ranch in Madera County in California's San Joaquin Valley. [2] After attending elementary school at St. Joachim in Madera, California and high school at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, he received a B.A. in English at Boston College, attended Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and completed a Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Harvard University. [3] [4]
Bergon has published twelve books—four novels, a critical study of Stephen Crane, five edited collections and anthologies, and most recently two books of essays. A major concern of his work is with the lives of Basque Americans in the West. [5] His writing about Native Americans ranges from the Shoshone of Nevada [6] to the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico. [7]
His Nevada trilogy consists of three novels spanning a century from the Shoshone massacre of 1911 (Shoshone Mike), [8] to the shooting of Fish and Game officers by the self-styled mountain man Claude Dallas (Wild Game), [9] to the current battle over nuclear waste in the Nevada desert (The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S). [10]
Bergon's California trilogy, consisting of, Jesse's Ghost, Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man: The New Old West and The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West: A Personal History, all focus on the San Joaquin Valley, and his Basque-Béarnais heritage. The book is a collection of personal essays he published over the decades. [11] The trilogy also draws attention to today's sons and daughters of the California Okies portrayed in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath .
He also writes about the natural history and environment of the American West in both fiction [12] and non-fiction, such as in The Journals of Lewis and Clark . [13]
With his wife, Holly St. John Bergon, he has published translations of the Spanish poets Antonio Gamaneda, José Ovejero, Xavier Queipo, and Violeta C. Rangel in New European Poets [14] and The European Constitution in Verse. [15]
Bergon has taught at the University of Washington and for many years at Vassar College, where he is Professor Emeritus of English. In 1998, Bergon was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. [16] [17]
Guns and Grammar, or How to Read the Second Amendment published in The Los Angeles Review of Books humorously but devastatingly makes that case that an incorrect textual reading of the Second Amendment by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia starts, and continues to cause, disastrous rulings on U.S. gun laws. [18]
I Understand Thee, and Can Speak Thy Tongue: California Unlocks Shakespeare's Gibberish published in the Los Angeles Review of Books links what has been regarded as gibberish in Shakespeare to the Basque language. [19]
Stephen Crane was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.
Madera is a city and county seat of Madera County, located in the San Joaquin Valley of California. As of the 2020 United States census, the city's population was 66,224.
Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr. was an American journalist and novelist during the Progressive Era, whose fiction was predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and The Pit (1903).
The Shoshone or Shoshoni are a Native American tribe with four large cultural/linguistic divisions:
Robert Laxalt was a Basque-American writer from Nevada.
Thomas Nicholas Meschery is an American former professional basketball player. Born in China, Meschery was a power forward with a 10-year National Basketball Association career from 1961 to 1971. He played for the Philadelphia/San Francisco Warriors and the Seattle SuperSonics. He played in the 1963 NBA All-Star Game, making him the first foreign-born NBA player to be selected as an NBA All-Star. The Warriors not only retired his number 14, but also gave him a unique honor by incorporating the number into the team's logo from 1967 to 1974.
Ecocriticism is the study of literature and ecology from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It was first originated by Joseph Meeker as an idea called "literary ecology" in his The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972).
David Anthony Durham is an American novelist, author of historical fiction and fantasy.
Farnsworth Wright was the editor of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the magazine's heyday, editing 179 issues from November 1924 to March 1940. Jack Williamson called Wright "the first great fantasy editor".
Basque Americans are Americans of Basque descent. According to the 2000 US census, there are 57,793 Americans of full or partial Basque descent.
Tod Goldberg is an American author and journalist best known for his novels Gangsters Don't Die (Counterpoint), Gangster Nation (Counterpoint), Gangsterland (Counterpoint) and Living Dead Girl, the popular Burn Notice series (Penguin/NAL) and the short story collection The Low Desert: Gangster Stories (Counterpoint).
Susan Palwick is an American writer and associate professor emerita of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She began her professional career by publishing "The Woman Who Saved the World" for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1985.
Charlton Grant Laird (1901–1984) was an American linguist, lexicographer, novelist, and essayist. Laird created the 1971 edition of the Webster's New World Thesaurus that became the standardized edition still used today. During his lifetime, he was probably best known for his language studies: books, textbooks, and reference works elucidating the English language for the layman along with his numerous contributions to dictionaries and thesauruses.
Megan Frances Edwards is an American writer and editor.
Magic in fiction is the endowment of characters or objects in works of fiction or fantasy with powers that do not naturally occur in the real world.
David Romtvedt is an American poet.
The Battle of Kelley Creek, also known as the Last Massacre, is often considered to be one of the last known massacres carried out between Native Americans and forces of the United States, and was a closing event to occur near the end of the American Indian warfare era. In January 1911 a small band of Shoshones were accused of rustling cattle and then killing four stockmen who went to investigate the dead cattle. A posse of policemen and citizens was sent to track the band, who were found encamped near Winnemucca, Nevada, in a region known as Kelley Creek. A largely one-sided battle ensued on February 25 that ended with the direct deaths of nine people, eight Daggetts and one posse member. At the time the affair was briefly characterized as a Native American revolt, though it is now mostly regarded as a family's attempted escape from law enforcement.
Mike Daggett, original Shoshoni name Ondongarte, was a Shoshone man who is best known for his involvement in the Battle of Kelley Creek, during which he was killed with several members of his family.
The Sagebrush School was the literary movement written primarily by men of Nevada. The sagebrush shrub is prevalent in the state. It was a broad-based movement as it included various literary genres such as drama, essays, fiction, history, humor, journalism, memoirs, and poetry. The name Sagebrush School was coined by Ella Sterling Mighels, who stated:
Sagebrush school? Why not? Nothing in all our Western literature so distinctly savors of the soil as the characteristic books written by the men of Nevada and that interior part of the State where the sagebrush grows.
Mary Josephine Estep was a Shoshone child survivor of the Battle of Kelley Creek, "the last massacre" of Native Americans in the United States, in 1911.
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