Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008 | midnight
Sally Denton, an investigative journalist who began her news career at the Boulder City News in 1975 and went on to pen five historical books, will be inducted Thursday into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame at UNR.
She is the 43rd honoree and joins the ranks of authors Mark Twain and Robert Laxalt.
Denton, the daughter of Ralph and Sara Denton, was born in Elko, grew up in Boulder City, and attended UNR before graduating in Colorado. The job at her hometown paper was her first, until she was fired by then-Publisher Morry Zenoff for "rather too candid coverage of local politics," she said.
Her latest book is "Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Fremont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America," about the explorer who is the namesake of downtown Las Vegas' Fremont Street.
Denton is also the author, with Roger Morris, of the 2001 book about Las Vegas, "The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America."
Her sixth book will be published next year: "A Force of Nature: Helen Gahagan Douglas and the War for America's Future," about an opera singer-turned-California congresswoman who served in the 1940s.
Denton's work about Las Vegas has been published in the New York Times, and her stories have run in the Washington Post and American Heritage.
She now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., where she teaches documentary film courses at the College of Santa Fe.
Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or [email protected].
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