Frank Bergon Literary and Pictorial Collection

Frank Bergon, a grandson of Basque immigrants, 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’s in Madera 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.

He has published eleven books—four novels, a critical study, a book of essays, 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. He writes about natural history and the environment in both fiction and essays. With his wife, Holly St. John Bergon, he has published translations of the Spanish poets Antonio Gamoneda, José Ovejero, Xavier Queipo, and Violeta Rangel.

He has taught at the University of Washington and for many years at Vassar College, where he is Professor Emeritus of English. He is a member of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

Bergon is going of the prominent voices of the Western literary landscape. From an almost neorealistic perspective, his novels recreate the conflicts between the American dream ideal and new Western values during the 20th century. Moreover, his work expands the traditional Western imagery, stressing the mark left by the Basque diaspora in this territory.