A Nevada Life is the biography of artist Richard Guy Walton, Nevada’s Grand Old Man of abstract art. Less well known is that Walton the gifted painter was also a prolific author of nonfiction and autobiographical novels. Born in San Francisco when there were still horses in the streets, and raised in the Central Valley, in 1929 at age fifteen he entered Reno, as he related in his first novel, got off the train, and was never quite the same. This eccentric and brilliant man was shaped by and helped shape Nevada’s cultural history during Reno’s heyday and Virginia City’s epoch as a bohemian mecca.

A Nevada Life surveys Walton’s artworks and writings as it follows the life of this colorful original. The narrative reveals new angles on such icons of Reno’s past as Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Robert Caples, Robert Laxalt and the daughters of Judge George Bartlett. Through Walton’s first marriage the reader hears the intimate story of a Basque institution, the Etcheberrys’ Santa Fe Hotel, and experiences life in a Basque sheep camp. Walton’s sojourns in Hollywood bring in composer Bernard Herrmann, writer Norman Corwin, director Alfred Hitchcock and more.

Walton died in 2005 at ninety-one.