Frank Bergon’s newest work is a thoughtful exploration of the ways that memories of random childhood events become unexpected revelations about life in the West. In many senses this project is a personalized version of Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man where Bergon explored the ways that a multiethnic and multiracial society shaped, and continues to shape, the day-to-day lived realities of the residents and communities of the San Joaquin Valley. Bergon’s latest book creation, however, is more elegiac in tone, paying tribute to ranching and farming lives that are disappearing under suburban and exurban sprawl, industrial farming, and white-collar job growth.
 

Frank Bergon is a critically acclaimed novelist, critic, and essayist whose writings focus primarily on the history and environment of the American West.  He was born in Ely, Nevada, and grew up on a ranch in Madera County in California’s San Joaquin Valley.  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.
 

Praise for Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man:

"A tour of the interior West worth taking."
—Kirkus Reviews

"...insightful... Bergon's memories and interviews ground larger historical events..."
—Publishers Weekly
 
“In 12 prose portraits of people and place, western novelist and historian Bergon portrays the marriage of Old West spirit with New West realities...a way of life and culture he believes to be misunderstood and misreported...Bergon sets this record straight with close-up stories of people with whom he grew up and befriended in the San Joaquin Valley.”
—Booklist
 
“With a novelist’s fine gifts for character and scene, a historian’s depth of perspective, and a local’s intimate knowledge and love, Frank Bergon leads us through California’s Big Valley, where the past lies entwined with the present and every critical tension in modern America plays out in its most distilled form.”
—Miriam Horn, author of Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman

The Central Valley has produced its share of writers—Maxine Hong Kingston, Leonard Gardiner, Joan Didion, and most famously John Steinbeck, who set much of The Grapes of Wrath in the Valley. Place matters to them all, but none quite so much as Bergon, who might legitimately be called the poet laureate of Central Valley. His powerful evocations reveal how distinctive and interesting it truly was during the middle decades of the twentieth century.
—Western American Literature

In elegant prose, Frank Bergon has conjured a complex portrait of the San Joaquin Valley of California during the mid-1950s and beyond, where some 90 distinct ethnic communities lived together for a century, his own valley family being Basque as were his beloved grandparents in Nevada. The Toughest Kid We Knew is one of the best literary memoirs written, focusing on the particular while evoking universal human experience.
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie

The Toughest Kid We Knew is a magnificent book about the American West and a multigenerational family’s ties to its ancestral homeland and to the daunting land of the San Joaquin Valley. Frank Bergon has delivered a literary bounty. I don’t think a page went by without an observation, insight, or detail that somehow sparked my imagination or stayed with me long after I’d turned the page. I loved spending time with these remarkable people in this unforgettable place.
—Meghan Daum, author of The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars

These essays are masterfully crafted.
—Daryl Farmer, author of Where We Land and Bicycling Beyond the Divide