Friends of the University Libraries

James Hulse
Nevada Writers Hall of Fame 1997

One glance at a list of books by James Hulse tells you immediately that this author writes for more than one audience. Since his first historical study, The Forming of the Communist International, was published in 1964, Hulse has produced a series of volumes ranging from Nevada history to philosophical criticism.

The Nevada Adventure, Hulse's popular history of his native state has remained in print for 32 years, through six editions at the University of Nevada Press where it was on the debut list in 1965. Another durable Hulse title is Forty Years in the Wilderness: Impressions of Nevadan 1940-1980 — still read, quoted and argued about after eleven years in print. "Depending upon a reader's point of view," late historian Wilbur Shepperson wrote in a foreward to Forty Years, "this book might be classified as a journalistic essay, a historical survey, a personal memoir or a moral admonition."

All these interpretations are consistent with the background of an author who has been a newspaper journalist, teacher, scholar and political activist. Early in his career, as a reporter for the Nevada State Journal (long before it merged with the Reno Evening Gazette,) the Nevada-born Hulse developed a clear, direct and readable style that followed him into his later scholarly writing. A love of history led him to a Ph.D. at Stanford University and to a permanent faculty post at the University of Nevada, Reno, his earlier alma mater. As a leader of Common Cause in Nevada, Hulse has followed his conscience, speaking out about social injustice whenever hs sees it.

"Perhaps it is Hulse's Mormon antecedents who brought him to crave greater ethical exactness," Shepperson wrote in 1986, "or perhaps it is his affinity for the ideas of the nineteenth century Unitarian teachers that led him to speak out, or perhaps it is his study of utopian radicals that caused him to appreciate the thinking of visionaries and rebels. Whatever the reason...James Hulse is a moralist..."

His interest in other moralists is reflected in the titles of some of his books: Revolutionists in London: a study of five unorthodox Socialists, (1970), and The Reputations of Socrates: The Afterlife of a Gadfly, (1995). Currently, Hulse is at work on a new edition of his history of the University of Nevada, first published in 1974, the university's centennial year.