Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Because his three published novels had their locale in the state of Nevada, Walter van Tilburg Clark had come to be considered a Westerner. Actually he was born in East Orland, Maine on August 3, 1909. When he was eight years old, his father became president of the University of Nevada. Clark attended high school in Reno and received a B. A. and M. A. from the University of Nevada. After two years devoted to philosophy and literature at the University of Vermont, he accepted a post at Cazenovia, New York as a teacher and basketball coach. With the appearance of The Ox-Bow Incident in 1940, Walter Van Tilburg Clark came into immediate prominence as a writer. His novel was acclaimed by the critics and later was made into what has been acknowledged to be one of the finest motion pictures ever produced in Hollywood. The City of Trembling Leaves, published in 1945, further established Clark's literary reputation as spokesman for the new generation in the West. This novel was followed in 1949 by a Western legend, The Track of the Cat (which also became a movie), and in 1950 by a volume of short stories entitled The Watchful Gods. Then a professor of English at San Francisco State College, Mr. Clark lived with his wife in San Francisco.