Description
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the classic novel The Ox-Bow Incident 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 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 enigmatic figure.

Based on widely scattered sources—personal papers and correspondence; Clark’s unpublished stories and poems; and interviews with families, friends, and others—Benson focuses on Clark’s intellectual and literary life as a writer, teacher, and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.

Reviews
“Jackson Benson proves here, as he did in his earlier superb biographies of John Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner, to be indisputably one of the country’s leading literary biographers. … I am convinced that this is quite simply the best book that will ever be done on Walter Van Tilburg Clark.”
—Richard Etulain, author of Stegner: Conversations on History and Literature

"In 1964 . . . Walter Van Tilburg Clark was one of the big names. . . . He was a man's man, a brilliant, inexhaustible talker, a really good tennis player, a teacher who seemed to care more about his students than himself, a good father whose son Bob gave Benson access to materials very close to the heart, a friend through thick and thin. . . . Benson doesn't shy away from anything, and in the end you have to marvel at his subject."
—Thomas Lyon, Western Historical Quarterly

Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 From Maine to Nevada
Chapter 2 Two Major Influences--Robert Cole Caples and Robinson Jeffers
Chapter 3 Marriage, Children, and Cazenovia Central School
Chapter 4 The Ox Bow Incident and the Western Novel
Chapter 5 Writer of Stories, Poems, and Letters
Chapter 6 The Ox Bow Movie and The City of Trembling Leaves
Chapter 7 Back to Nevada and The Track of the Cat
Chapter 8 Virginia City and The Watchful Gods and Other Stories
Chapter 9 Away from Home--Frustration and Longing
Chapter 10 From Iowa City, to Omaha, and to Columbia, Missouri
Chapter 11 Two Resignations, Son and Father
Chapter 12 Alone in Missoula and in Palo Alto
Chapter 13 The Move to Montana and Uncompleted Writing Projects
Chapter 14 On to Mill Valley and to Teaching at San Francisco State
Chapter 15 Back to Nevada and Becoming Alf Doten
Chapter 16 Teaching and Telling Stories in Reno
Chapter 17 The Doten Journals and Declining Health
Chapter 18 The Sweet Promised Land of Nevada
Notes and Documentation
Index