Las Vegas Is a Faithful Mormon City: Phyllis Barber’s Search for Identity through Fiction and Place

In Phyllis Barber’s memoir How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir, Las Vegas exercises a pivotal role. The Mormon ideals of purity, modesty and chastity do not come to mind when thinking of Las Vegas. Barber’s literature is a literary search for identity, and identity that allows good and evil in a wide array of possibilities. Las Vegas is in that sense the perfect stage to perform her search. Furthermore, Barber’s autobiography contributes with a new different approach to Las Vegas as an iconic city and to the West as a paradigm in which American identity was formed.