Patricia Cooper-Smith

Susan Berman

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Susan Berman (1945-2000) lived in Las Vegas from 1945 to 1957. Her father, David ("Davie") Berman, was a prominent hotel owner, devoted Jew, and important citizen of Las Vegas.

Reno Divorce Colony Literature

From the 1920s through the 1960s, Reno was the divorce center of the United States. Known as the Colony, Reno attracted the famous and infamous. The literature that emerged from the Colony included informational pamphlets and brochures, magazines, newspaper articles, short stories, poems, approximately two dozen novels, and two plays. With rare exceptions, the literature was genre and pulp fiction—often no more than true confessions or anecdotal storytelling.

Nevada Travel Literature

Nevada travel literature offers an outsider's perspective of the state's geography, environment, and culture. It is the reportage and impressions of travelers whose journeys of choice or necessity have led them to the Great Basin and Nevada. The literature ranges from explorer and emigrant diaries to the avant-garde. As visitors, the writers attempt to express the "otherness" of the place, and often the central character or metaphor is the land.

Mary Hunter Austin

Mary Hunter Austin set many of her early stories and novels in the desert and small towns along the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains where she lived from 1891 to 1906. From the Great Basin years came Austin's best-known work, The Land of Little Rain (1903), fourteen sketches describing the land and its inhabitants.

Hunter Stockton Thompson

Journalist-anarchist Hunter Stockton Thompson (a.k.a. Dr. Gonzo and Raoul Duke) came of age in the 1960s with New Journalism—a reporting style that, according to writer Tom Wolfe, uses scene by scene description, complete dialogue, third person point-of-view, and careful reporting of everyday gestures. Thompson's exaggeration of the style became known as Gonzo Journalism, epitomized by his classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971).

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