The Ox-Bow Man: A Biography of Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Walter Van Tilburg Clark was one of the West's most important literary figures. Author of the classic novel The Ox-Bow Incident, he hlped to change American literature by making the West a legitimate subject for serious fiction. As a comparatively young man, he published three compelling novels and an acclaimed collection of short stories, then remained almost silent for the rest of his life, the victim of a paralyzing case of writer's block. Now Jackson J. Benson, one of the country's foremost literary biographers, has produced the first full-length biography of this brilliant, enigmatic, and ultimately tragic figure.

Based on widely scattered sources-personal papers and correspondence; Clark's unpublished stories and poems; and interviews with family members, friends, and others-Benson focuses on Clark's intellectual and literary life as a writer, teacher, and westerner, masterfully balancing his engaging account of the experiences, people, and settings of Clark's life with a penetrating examination of Clark's complex psyche and the crippling perfectionism that virtually ended his career. He also offers a thoughtful assessment of Clark's place in Western writing. In these pages, Clark and his world live again, a warm, complicated, anguished human being in a modern West lively with change and rich in friendship and cultural excitement.