Two-Buck Chuck & the Marlboro Man: The New Old West

By Frank Bergon

Book Overview

Frank Bergon's astonishing personal portrayals of people in California's San Joaquin Valley reveal a country where the culture of a vanishing West lives on in many twenty-first-century Westerners, despite the radical technological transformations around them. All are immigrants, migrants, their children, or their grandchildren whose lives intertwine with the author's, including several races and ethnicities: Chicanos, Mexicans, African Americans, Italians, Asians, Native Americans, Scots-Irish descendants of Steinbeck's "Okies," and Basques of the author's own heritage.

Chapters feature the celebrated Native American writer Louis Owens and the untold stories of California's legendary Fred Franzia, the controversial creator of the Charles Shaw wines dubbed "Two-Buck Chuck," and Darrell Winfield, a Dust Bowl migrant, and a lifelong working cowboy who for more than thirty years reigned as the iconic Marlboro Man.

Bergon exposes a West in flux that challenges the romanticized West of popular culture. While still retaining many of the features and traits of the Old West, the contemporary Westerners featured here also confront the realities of life in the West (and America) today--a region caught between its roots and an ever-changing modern world.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1948908069
• ISBN13: 9781948908061
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.6" x 8.6"