Robert Laxalt was born in 1923, a decade and a half after his father Dominique Laxalt and his mother Theresa Laxalt had emigrated to the United States in 1906 to herd sheep. His brother Paul Laxalt later became Governor of Nevada and then a United States Senator. After graduating from Carson City High School, Robert Laxalt attended Santa Clara University and then the University of Nevada at Reno. Robert Laxalt began his writing career as a journalist working for United Press International, before starting his own news service in Nevada in the 1950s. In 1957, Laxalt published his second book Sweet Promised Land, which was widely read and remains his best-known work today. This book tells the story of Laxalt journeying with his father back to France. Laxalt later published over a dozen books, among which several are biographical or semi-fictional accounts of his family's history. In 1961, Robert Laxalt founded the University of Nevada Press and served as its first editor.
Basque identity
From the Basque Oral History Project:
Books by Robert Laxalt
The Violent Land: Tales the Old Timers Tell. Reno: Nevada Publishing Co., 1950.
Sweet Promised Land. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.
A Man in the Wheatfield. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Selected by the American Library Association as one of the six notable works of American fiction that year.
Nevada. New York: Coward McCann, 1970. Children's book.
A Private War: An American Code Officer in the Belgian Congo. University of Nevada Press, 1998.
The Land of My Fathers: A Son's Return to the Basque Country. University of Nevada Press, 1999.
Time of the Rabies. University of Nevada Press, 2000.
Travels With My Royal: A Memoir of the Writing Life. University of Nevada Press, 2001.
Books and Selected Articles About Robert Laxalt
Etulain, Richard. "Robert Laxalt: Basque Writer of the American West" in Portraits of Basques in the New World. University of Nevada Press; 1999. pp. 212-29.
Lerude, Warren. Robert Laxalt: Stories of a Storyteller. Reno, Nevada: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2013.
Rio, David. Robert Laxalt: The Voice of the Basques in American Literature. Reno, Nevada: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2007.
Rio, David. "Robert Laxalt: A Basque Pioneer in the American Literary West." American Studies International; 2003 Oct; 41: 60-81.
Rio Raigades, David; Urza, Carmelo, translator. "Identity and Transition in In a Hundred Graves: A Basque Portrait." Journal of the Society of Basque Studies in America; 1995; 15: 62-73.
