Walter van Tilburg Clark

Geboren in East Orland, Maine. When Clark was nine years old, his father became president of the University of Nevada in Reno. Clark grew up in that city, attending public high school and the University of Nevada, where he earned an M.A. in English in 1932. That year he published his first book, Ten Women in Gale’s House and Shorter Poems. Clark returned to New England to teach at the University of Vermont, where he later said that he discovered he was tied to his western roots: ‘My feeling is that landscape is character, not background. It’s not a stage. It’s and active agent. It must be.’ In 1940, while teaching in Cazenovia, New York, Clark published the novel that made his reputation as an important Western writer, The Ox-Bow Incident. Narrated in the first person by a cowboy, the story has no strong American hero. Instead Clark dramatized an incident during which a crowd is swayed by the passions of mob rule to act as a posse and murder three innocent men suspected of cattle rustling. Clark followed this book with two more novels set in Nevada. He also published about twenty short stories, many of them collected in ‘The Watchful Gods and Other Stories’ (1950). In 1962 Clark became a writer-in-residence at the University of Nevada in Reno, where he taught until his death from cancer nine years later.