Walter van Tilburg Clark

Walter van Tilburg Clark (born Aug. 3, 1909, East Orland, Maine, U.S.—died Nov. 10, 1971, Reno, Nev.) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works, set in the American West, used the familiar regional materials of the cowboy and frontier to explore philosophical issues.

Clark grew up in Reno, which forms the background for his novel The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), the story of a sensitive adolescent boy’s development. His best-known work is The Ox-Bow Incident (1940). The story of a lynching in 1885 of three innocent men, it conveys a powerful and dramatic insight into mob psychology. A film version appeared in 1943. The Track of the Cat (1949), a tale of a hunt for a black panther during a blizzard, is a moral parable. Clark’s “The Portable Phonograph,” which imagines the aftermath of a devastating war, was published in the short-story collection The Watchful Gods (1950) and was much anthologized in the following decades. From the 1960s, Clark was a teacher of writing at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University).