Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Walter Van Tilburg Clark | |
---|---|
Born |
East Orland, Maine | August 3, 1909
Died |
November 10, 1971 62) Virginia City, Nevada | (aged
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.
Biography
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.[1] 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.[2]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.[3][4] 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).
Although he continued to write prolifically after 1950, Clark published no more fiction during the remaining two decades of his life.Thereafter, he devoted his creative energies to teaching and lecturing. From 1954 to 1956, he was a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he was noted by his students for his teaching skills and for his eccentric clothing which consisted of a blue turtleneck shirt, maroon corduroy jacket, grey slacks and blue socks which never varied throughout the term. Clark began teaching at a writer's worskshop at San Francisco State University during the summer of 1955, moving to San Francisco in 1956 after he was hired there full-time to establish a formal Creative Writing Program.[5] He remained there until 1962.[6]
Clark would return to Reno to serve as the writer-in-residence at the university from 1962 until his death (in Virginia City, Nevada) on November 10, 1971. He spent the last ten years of his life editing The Journals of Alfred Doten, He died almost two years to the day after his wife's death, and both died of cancer, as his biographer Jackson J. Benson noted in his biography of Clark, The Ox-Bow Man.[7] Clark was chosen along with Robert Laxalt to be the first writer inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame when it was established in 1988 by the Friends of the University of Nevada Libraries.[8]
Books by Clark
- Fiction
- The Ox-Bow Incident, Random House (New York, NY), 1940; published with an introduction by Clifton Fadiman, Heritage, 1942; published with an afterword by W. P. Webb, New American Library (New York, NY), 1960; reprinted, Modern Library Paperback Classics (New York, NY), 2001.
- The City of Trembling Leaves, Random House (New York, NY), 1945; published as Tim Hazard, Kimber (England), 1951(an abridged version). Reprinted as part of the Western Literature Series, University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 1991, 2003. With a "Foreword" by Robert Laxalt.
- The Track of the Cat, Random House (New York, NY), 1949, reprinted, University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 1993, 2003, with an "Afterword" by Walter Van Tilburg Clark.
- The Watchful Gods and Other Stories, Random House (New York, NY), 1950. (contains "Hook," "The Wind and the Snow of Winter," "The Rapids," "The Anonymous," "The Buck in the Hills," "Why Don't You Look Where You're Going?," "The Indian Well," "The Fish Who Could Close His Eyes," "The Portable Phonograph," and "The Watchful Gods"). Reprinted, University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 2004. With a "Foreword" by Ann Ronald[9]
- Poetry
- Christmas Comes to Hialsen (1930)
- "Dawn, Washoe Valley; Big Dusk; Pyramid Lake" (1932)
- Ten Women in Gale's House: And Shorter Poems (1932)
- "To a Friend with New Shoes" (1934)
- Other
- (Author of foreword) Robert Cole Caples: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1927-63 (catalog), [Reno, NV], 1964.
- (Editor) The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849-1903, three volumes, University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 1973.
- Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Critiques, edited by Charlton Laird; University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 1983. In this volume, some of Clark's works were collected and grouped with essays about Clark and his writings
Further reading
- Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 28, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.
- Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 9: "American Novelists, 1910-1945", Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.
- Lee, L. L., Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Boise State College (Boise, ID), 1973.
- Lindroth, James R., Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident: A Critical Commentary, Monarch Press (New York, NY), 1966.
- Stegner, Wallace, One Way to Spell Man, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1982, pp. 124–35.
- Twentieth-Century Western Writers, St. James Press (Chicago, IL), 1991.
- Westbrook, Max, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Twayne (New York, NY), 1969.
References
- ↑ "Biography - Clark, Walter Van Tilburg (1909-1971)", Contemporary Authors (Biography), Thomson Gale, 2004.
- ↑ http://www.chipublib.org/walter-van-tilburg-clark-biography/
- ↑ http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/walter-van-tilburg-clark
- ↑ Walter Van Tilburg Clark: The reason for the Nevada author’s sudden silence is still shrouded in mystery by Michael Engelmann, accessed 08 November 2014
- ↑ http://www.sfsu.edu/~sfsumag/archive/spring_07/clark.html
- ↑ http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/walter-van-tilburg-clark
- ↑ Benson, Jackson J. (2004). The Ox-Bow Man: A Biography of Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press.
- ↑ Nevada Writers Hall of Fame
- ↑ http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/ann-ronald Ann Ronald
External links
- A Guide to the Papers of Walter Van Tilburg Clark, University of Nevada, Reno, Special Collections.
- Works by or about Walter Van Tilburg Clark in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Nevada Writers Hall of Fame 1988 entry on Clark in the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
- Publisher's page for Charlton Laird's Critiques at University of Nevada Press
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