Friends of the University Libraries

Nevada Writers Hall of Fame 2001
Life-long Writers Honored

This is the story as it appeared in the Friends Newsletter Fall 2001

The easiest way to begin a story about the 2001 Nevada Writers Hall of Fame is to announce the winners: Morris Brownell, Robert Gorrell and Rollan Melton. But that is most unimaginative – and these three honorees are far from that.

They are gifted, life-long writers with diverse writing interests. Brownell is a biographer, specializing in 18th century figures and their relationship to the arts of the period; Gorrell is a linguist who has written volumes on English usage; and Melton is a journalist whose Reno Gazette-Journal columns have entertained us for years.

The Hall of Fame committee couldn’t have picked better recipients. Said committee chairperson Peggy Urie: "All three have spent their lives dealing with words."

How far back does that go? Gorrell’s first textbook, Practice in English Communication, was published in 1947. Gorrell and two colleagues at Indiana University collaborated on the book for an Army program course they were teaching.

"But the course was cancelled the day the book came out," said Gorrell with a chuckle that bubbles to the surface whenever he laughs at himself. So he revised the text (the other two lost interest) for a broader audience and a second edition was published. Later, at the University of Nevada (as it was called then), Gorrell collaborated with the late Charlton Laird on many textbooks. Their biggest hit, Modern English Rhetoric and Handbook, lived through seven editions.

Gorrell’s love of language and words began when he was a child. Gorrell remembers before he started school - "maybe around age 5" - making up a story about mouse twins. His mother, he says, kidded him about it, but she readily typed up his narration. "I thought it was very clever with all my names for them, such as Jerry, Terry, Millie and Willie," said Gorrell, chuckling again.

Though nonfiction is his expertise, Gorrell has experimented with fictional writing off and on all his life. Last year his efforts paid off: his first novel, Murder at the Rose, an Elizabethan mystery (conceived long before the movie "Shakespeare in Love") was published by Black Rock Press.

Publications of another type launched Melton’s writing career. If you count his sports column in the Fallon Weekly Standard, written when he was 15, his journalistic career began 55 years ago. From then to now, Melton has worn many hats, including pressman, printer, newsboy, reporter, publisher and corporate executive.

Everybody who knows Melton knows he could retire. He knows it too. So why does he continue to write?

"Why do you breathe, eat, enjoy seasons and love music? Because it is part of life and what you love doing," he said. "I love being with people and writing about them and I could never turn away from doing that. The only way I’ll retire is to be stopped by the end of life itself."

Melton’s column has been a fixture in the Reno Gazette-Journal for 23 years. He’s interviewed tens of thousands of people. Some are celebrities, but most are everyday Nevada folks. Melton, who refers to himself as a "storyteller" rather than a journalist, often says that his joy is writing columns about non-public people – "folks who don’t get their names in the paper unless they are born or die or get into some kind of mischief."

As for Brownell, he writes about well-known public figures of the 18th century. Men like Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole, the subject of his latest book nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Brownell’s biographies stretch beyond chronicling his subjects’ lives to painting a picture of 18th century life and his subjects’ place and influence in it. So for example, Brownell’s 1978 prize-winning book, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England, was not only a study of Pope, but also an examination of the literature, landscape and architecture of the period. That interdisciplinary approach is also the core of The Prime Minister of Taste: A Portrait of Horace Walpole. In this book, Brownell argues that Walpole was a serious patron, collector and historian of the arts, not a "trifling collector of curiosities," as previous detractors have described him.

A meticulous scholar and researcher, Brownell toiled over Walpole for nearly a decade. Research included studying 48 volumes of Walpole’s letters, a task few of us would tackle. But Brownell is the first to tell you he belongs to the "old school of work ethic." With every project, he immerses himself in his work.

Brownell got hooked on research early in life. He traces its genesis to Middlesex School in Concord, Mass., not far from Thoreau’s Walden Pond. There, he studied Latin, French and English and won a history prize for an essay on Genghis Kahn – "the only paper submitted in the contest," he adds, quick to poke fun at himself.

As a Princeton humanities major, he focused on literature and the arts, followed by graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley where he fell in love with the re-creation of letter-writers’ lives. "I also became an addict of the DNB – the Dictionary of National Biography," he said.

Brownell has professor Bertrand Bronson to thank for his thesis topic: "He handed me a  yellow piece of paper I still have: ‘Pope and the Arts: percept, example, influence,’ a sentence that determined the next 15 years of my life."

While Brownell writes about people and life in England, Melton stays close to home. His love for Nevada and its people is deeply rooted in his writing. Ask him where that passion came from and he’s likely to begin with his nomadic youth. Constantly on the move, he attended 18 grammar schools in four states and three high schools in three states.

When he arrived in Fallon at 15, he was a poor student, so far behind that he’d dropped out of his last school in Oregon. He enrolled again, and this time, he found not only success, but also a home. "Without knowing it," Melton said, "I’d found a permanent place to hang my hat." He’s been paying loving tribute to Nevada ever since.

The easiest way to end this story is with a simple period. But there’s one more thing to add: this Nevada Writers Hall of Fame honor acknowledgement.

"I’ve received honors and plaques throughout my life for alleged contributions to my profession and craft, but nothing pleases me more than this award. When your contemporaries pick you, that really amounts to something," said Melton, whose words speak for each of the honorees.

— Sandra Macias

Special Collections

Please direct questions to Millie Mitchell
Director of Development, University Libraries
Updated June 12, 2008