CLARK, WALTER VAN TILBURG

born Aug. 3, 1909, East Orland, Maine, U.S. died Nov. 10, 1971, Reno, Nev. American novelist and short-story writer whose works, set in the American West, used the familiar regional materials of the cowboy and frontier to explore philosophical issues. Clark grew up in Reno, which forms the background for his novel The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), the story of a sensitive adolescent boy's development. His best-known work is The Ox-Bow Incident (1940). The story of a lynching in 1885 of three innocent men, it conveys a powerful and dramatic insight into mob psychology. A film version appeared in 1943. The Track of the Cat (1949), a tale of a hunt for a black panther during a blizzard, is also a moral parable. The Watchful Gods (1950) is a collection of short stories. From the 1960s, Clark was a teacher of writing at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University).