Bergon has published twelve books—four novels, a critical study of
Stephen Crane, five edited collections and anthologies, and most recently two books of essays. A major concern of his work is with the lives of
Basque Americans in the West. His writing about Native Americans ranges from the Shoshone of Nevada to the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico. His Nevada trilogy consists of three novels spanning a century from the Shoshone massacre of 1911 (
Shoshone Mike), to the shooting of Fish and Game officers by the self-styled mountain man
Claude Dallas (
Wild Game), to the current battle over nuclear waste in the Nevada desert (
The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S). Bergon's California trilogy, consisting of, ''Jesse's Ghost
, Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man: The New Old West
and The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West: A Personal History,
all focus on the San Joaquin Valley, and his Basque-Béarnais heritage. His writing was the subject of a 2019 conference and 2020 book by scholars and writers from the U.S. and the Basque Country: Visions of a Basque American Western: International Perspectives on the Writings of Frank Bergon''. The trilogy also draws attention to today's sons and daughters of the California
Okies portrayed in
Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath. ''Jesse's Ghost'' was selected in 2024 for
The New York Times "Best Books About California." He also writes about the natural history and environment of the American West in both fiction and non-fiction, such as in
The Journals of Lewis and Clark. With his wife, Holly St. John Bergon, he has published translations of the Spanish poets Antonio Gamaneda, José Ovejero, Xavier Queipo, and Violeta C. Rangel in
New European Poets and
The European Constitution in Verse. Bergon has taught at the
University of Washington and for many years at
Vassar College, where he is professor emeritus of English. In 1998, Bergon was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. In 2024, he was included into the Bellarmine Hall of Fame. ==Books==