How strange that I should have just written of his mother, Therese Laxalt, in my Women of Nevada series, only to lose her son within days of publishing that story.
Mr. Laxalt was more than a writer. He was a first-degree storyteller, a pioneer in Nevada's university system, and a great representative of the children of immigrants in Nevada. As he wrote in his book, Sweet Promised Land, "...the irony of it was that our mothers and fathers were truer Americans than we, because they had forsaken home and family, and gone into the unknown of a new land with only courage and the hands that God gave them, and had given us in our turn the right to be born American."
One of six children born to Basque immigrants who had settled in Nevada, Laxalt grew up in Carson City along with his five siblings. His mother, Therese, owned and operated a boarding house and saw to the family's business affairs. His father, Dominique, tended his sheep in the hills and mountains of Nevada and was away for long stretches at a time. In one of his books, Laxalt describes the times his mother would send him and his brothers off to find their father to take him provisions or some paperwork that needed his attention. The boys would stare at one another in wide-eyed dismay at the overwhelming prospect of another search over the vast Nevada wilderness looking for one man and his sheep.
Over the years, Laxalt would write and publish several books and magazine articles describing the life and hardships of the American immigrant, and in particular about Basque immigrants. His work would be awarded literary honors and even be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize (A Cup of Tea in Pamplona and The Basque Hotel). The book that will probably remain closest to the hearts of his fans is Sweet Promised Land.
Written shortly after a joint trip with his father back to the "old country" of France, Sweet Promised Land is the story of a young man coming to terms with his immigrant father. He writes poignantly of the difficulty in learning to see the world through the eyes of his father, and of the journey to visit with people his father thought he would never see again after having left them behind nearly 50 years before.
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