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

Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the classic novel
The Ox-Bow Incident , was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, who helped to change American literature by making the West and its vast, haunted landscapes a legitimate subject for serious fiction. But his career, which began so brilliantly, largely ended when he was still a comparatively young man, stifled by a paralyzing case of writer’s block. Jackson J. Benson, one of the country’s foremost literary biographers, has produced the first full-length biography of this brilliant, enigmatic figure, focusing on Clark’s intellectual and literary life as a writer and teacher, and on his life in the transforming midcentury West of which he was so passionately a part. Available now for the first time in paperback,
The Ox-Bow Man
is both a remarkably astute and sensitive examination of a complex, ultimately anguished writer and a sage assessment of Clark’s pivotal place in the literary history of the West. More than a biography, this is a compelling examination of the literary world of the twentieth-century West and of the evolution of Western writing at the hands of one of its greatest masters.