Walter Van Tilburg Clark
| Walter Van Tilburg Clark | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 3, 1909 East Orland, Maine |
| Died | November 10, 1971 (aged 62) Virginia City, Nevada |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Spouse(s) | Barbara Frances Morse |
Walter Van Tilburg Clark (August 3, 1909 — November 10, 1971) was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and is known primarily for his novels and short stories. He was the first inductee into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 1988. Two of his novels, The Ox-Bow Incident and The Track of the Cat, were made into films. As a writer, Clark taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues.
Born in East Orland, Maine, Clark grew up and went to college in Reno, where his father, Walter Ernest Clark, was president of the University of Nevada. In 1933 Clark married Barbara Frances Morse and moved to Cazenovia, New York, where he taught high school English and began his fiction-writing career.
Clark's first published novel, The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), was successful and is often considered to be the first modern Western, without the usual clichés and formulaic plots of the genre. It is a tale about a lynch mob mistaking three innocent travelers for cattle rustlers. When the travelers are killed, the lynch mob finds that they were wrong. The book examines law and order as well as culpability. It was well received and gave Clark literary acclaim that was unusual for a writer of Westerns. In 1943 it was adapted into a movie featuring Henry Fonda.
Over the next decade, Clark published two more novels: The City of Trembling Leaves (1945) and The Track of the Cat (1949). In 1950, a collection of short stories, The Watchful Gods and Other Stories, was released. Since they began appearing in national magazines during the 1940s, Clark's short stories gained national recognition earning five O. Henry Prize's between 1941 and 1945. Since this initial success, some of these stories (notably "Hook" and "The Wind And The Snow Of Winter") have been anthologized consistently as classic examples of the genre. Clark's short story, "The Portable Phonograph" - a poignant depiction of survivors in the aftermath of nuclear war - is also well known. Two Hollywood films were inspired by Clark's writings, and one of these (The Ox-Bow Incident) received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. The other film was Track of the Cat, based on Clark's novel The Track of the Cat. (Note that the film's title drops the definite article used in the novel's title).
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