Cheryll Glotfelty - Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State

Eighteenth-century maps of North America show a mysterious blank space lying between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, labeled Tierra Incognitaunknown land. Three hundred years later, as we enter the twenty-first century, Nevada occupies that space. One of the leading tourist destinations in the world, for the last two decades this once-unknown land has been the fastest-growing state in the United States. Today Nevada is well knownbut not known well. Its literary heritage, for example, is virtually incognita. Who are Nevadas authors? How has Nevada been imaginatively explored and construed? What are its stories? Where are its poems? This anthology answers these questions and fills in perhaps the last remaining blank space on the literary map of America.

In the early 1990s my department chair asked me to revive a course that was listed in the university catalog as Literature of the Far West and Nevada. By assigning my students the task of finding and reporting on a Nevada book, I figured I had fulfilled the expectations of the and Nevada portion of the course. To my surprise, the class reports changed my life. The books my students read and talked about sparked my interest and imagination. As I wrote the titles down on my Must Read list, I noticed that the students were deeply invested in talking about regional books. Nevada literature mattered to them in a way that other literature did not. It was personal. So I began my new career of reading and teaching Nevada literature. I soon realized that there were too many good books to fit into one course, and I wondered why there was so little knowledge of these works, even among specialists of western American literature. As a new champion of Nevada writing, I decided to put together this anthology, to make Nevadas literature more widely known and readily available to Nevadans and to anyone who reads with a spirit of curiosity and a taste for adventure.

I have spent many happy hoursand more than ten yearsprowling around in libraries and bookstores, talking to authors, archivists, and avid readers of western Americana, poring over bibliographies, surfing the Internet, and tracking down leads. My favorite hours took place in my office behind a closed door, on my couch with a cup of tea, nose in a book. When friends asked about the anthologys progress,I was evasive, replying that I was still... uh... in the research phase. It has been a wonderful and enormous project. Ive experienced the quiet euphoria of many Eureka! Ive found it! moments, discovering golden words lying in wait between the drab covers of a dusty book.

Now the time has come to go public, to stop researching and share the spoils. First, a few words about selection criteria and organization. My overriding purpose is to enable readers to discover Nevada through stories and poems, to explore this interesting and paradoxical place via its literary trails. Every piece in this book is either set in Nevada or is about Nevada or Nevadans. The result is an unusually wide range of authors. This anthology features Nevadas best-known authors, such as Mark Twain, Sarah Winnemucca, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Robert Laxalt. These writers left us enduring works that have shaped our imaginative understanding of Nevada and its people. Also included are established and emerging Nevada writers from all parts of the state whose work has been recognized with prestigious literary awards, such as the Pushcart Prize, the Drue Heinz Prize, the New York Times Notable Book selection, Guggenheim Fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Western States Book Award, and the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and Silver Pen Awards.

Beyond these obvious choices, youll find some surprises. Few people, for example, would think of Jack London as a Nevada author; however, his reminiscence of conning a Reno homemaker into a free dinner explores vintage Nevada themes of deception, gullibility, opportunity, and luck and recalls the hobo experience of Reno in the early 1900s, when it was known as a railroad town. Confession, therefore, made the cut, as did good writing by nonresident authors such as John Muir, Arthur Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Gary Snyder, writers whose fine work illuminates important facets of Nevada experience.