Name Frank Bergon | Role Writer | |
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Books Shoshone Mike, The Wilderness Reader, The temptations of St Ed, Stephen Crane's artistry | ||
Frank bergon reads from jesse s ghost
Frank Bergon (born 1943) is an American writer whose novels, essays, anthologies, and literary criticism focus primarily on the American West.
Contents
- Frank bergon reads from jesse s ghost
- The Toughest Kid We Knew
- Biography
- Writing career
- Books
- Awards
- References
"The Toughest Kid We Knew"
Biography
Frank Bergon was born in Ely, Nevada, and grew up on a ranch in Madera County in California’s San Joaquin Valley. After attending elementary school at St. Joachim in Madera, California and high school at Bellarmine 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.
Writing career
Bergon has published ten books—four novels, a critical study of Stephen Crane, and five edited collections and anthologies. A major concern of his work is with the lives of Basque Americans in the West. His writing about Native Americans ranges from the Shoshone of Nevada to the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico.
His Nevada trilogy consists of three novels spanning a century from the Shoshone massacre of 1911 (Shoshone Mike), to the shooting of Fish and Game officers by the self-styled mountain man Claude Dallas (Wild Game), to the current battle over nuclear waste in the Nevada desert (The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S).
Bergon’s new California trilogy, beginning with the novel, Jesse’s Ghost, focuses on his Basque-Béarnais heritage in the Central Valley of California. Jesse's Ghost 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 and non-fiction, such as in The Journals of Lewis and Clark.
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 and The European Constitution in Verse.
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.