Walter Van Tilburg Clark is most widely known as the author of The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), possibly the best and most realistic cowboy novel ever written. Set in Nevada in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident immediately established and secured Clark's place in...

Walter Van Tilburg Clark was a Western writer but not a Westerner by birth. Born in East Orland, Maine, on 3 August 1909, he did not see the American West until he was nine. Moreover, his father and mother were intellectual and artistic, not people of...

The Ox-Bow Man A BIOGRAPHY OF WALTER VAN TILBURG CLARK Jackson J. Benson University of Nevada Press, Reno, 2006. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, xi + 448 pp. $39.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. Walter Van Tilburg Clark hated pulp Westerns and the movies they spawned....

Walter Van Tilburg Clark's "The Wind and the Snow of Winter" describes a mythic pattern whose experiential significance is increased when contrasted against the Celtic legend of wandering Oisin. Clark, familiar with Celtic mythology, traces the movements of a gold prospector who frequents the...

Walter Clark has come to be known through the years as the essential Western novelist, the one who did perhaps more than anyone else to define (in his fiction) the mode of perception, the acquisition of knowledge, and the style which we tend to call Western…. [His] prose style is imagistic, symbolic (or metaphoric), and direct, tapping the subconscious but staying in touch with the real world. (His style is not unlike that of Harvey Fergusson, but it is more forceful and more frequently evocative, pr...

["The City of Trembling Leaves"] is a book of which the faults and the virtues are combined in an unusual way and which may baffle or give pause to the reviewer…. It is a long history of a young composer growing up in Reno, Nevada, and it manages to be undramatic with a consistency that seems to be not deliberate but the result of a complete indifference to the ways in which stories are conventionally built (the author can tell a good story when it happens to work out that way, as is de...

Mr. Clark appears in this collection of his short stories ["The Watchful Gods and Other Stories"] as a sensitive and cultivated writer, as much at home with knowledgeable outdoor men and their natural world as with intellectuals and academicians whose connection to the earth on which they live is only that of a man to his city apartment. This unlikely but graceful combination seems to be responsible for a prose style that is wiry, masculine, and mature, and that has produced almost by its own ...