Walter Van Tilburg Clark – author of ‘The Ox-Bow Incident’ – American Naziism – Has It Happened Here?
The article below appears at ONE – the “Online Nevada Encyclopedia” sponsored by Nevada Humanities. A link to their website can be found below.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
“Walter Van Tilburg Clark is considered one of the most distinguished Nevada writers of the twentieth century. An author, poet, lecturer, and teacher, Clark’s interpretations of the American West are his greatest legacy. Clark was born August 3, 1909 in East Orland, Maine, to Walter Ernest, an educator and economist, and Euphemia Abrams Clark, a musician. In 1917, the family relocated to Reno, Nevada, where the elder Clark took a job as the president of the University of Nevada, a position he held until 1937. Clark attended Reno schools, excelling in English and literature. He studied at the University of Nevada and received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English. He then taught at Reno High School and at the University of Nevada. Over the course of his career, Clark held many brief positions teaching and lecturing across the country, including at the University of Vermont in 1933, where he worked as a teaching assistant while completing work on a second master’s degree. This allowed him to return to the Northeast and spend time with his mother in the beloved family cabin in Maine. On October 14 of that year, he married Barbara Morse, with whom he would have two children—Robert Morse and Barbara Anne. In November, he received national recognition when two of his poems were featured in Poetry. From 1936 to 1945, Clark taught English and coached athletics in Cazenovia, New York. During this period, he published several short stories such as “Hook,” “The Buck in the Hills” and “The Wind and the Snow of Winter.” These stories not only earned him national respect, but they also explored the western environment and man’s relationship with nature, themes that resurfaced throughout his career. In October 1940, Clark published his first novel, The Ox-Bow Incident, which became a Twentieth Century Fox film starring Henry Fonda in 1943. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture but lost to Casablanca. In May 1945, Random House published Clark’s second novel, The City of Trembling Leaves. The strenuous schedule of teaching and coaching slowed his writing and took a tremendous toll on his health. To recuperate from exhaustion, Clark returned to the West, settling in Taos, New Mexico, where he socialized and intended to write. But he wrote little. He and Barbara drove to Nevada where they rented a house in Washoe Valley, between Reno and Carson City. In 1949, Random House published Track of the Cat, and critics generally received it well. Later that summer, the family moved to Virginia City, Nevada, where they bought a home. Clark taught English at Virginia City High School for the 1950-1951 school year. Also in 1950, Clark’s fourth major publication, The Watchful Gods and Other Stories, a collection of short stories, was released. In the fall of 1952, Clark accepted a half-time teaching position at the University of Nevada, but resigned in June 1953 in protest over a dispute between the faculty and administration. From 1954 to 1956, Clark lived and taught in Missoula, Montana. He moved to the Bay Area in 1956 and taught at San Francisco State until 1962. In November 1957, Warner Brothers Pictures released Track of the Cat starring Robert Mitchum. In the summer of 1962, Clark accepted an eighteen-month contract with the University of Nevada to prepare a biography of the Comstock writer Alfred Doten, which led to his editing of Doten’s journals. The project consumed him until his death. In 1968, he and Barbara moved back to Virginia City, purchasing and refurbishing the home they had first rented in 1949. The Clarks lived in their Comstock home for the rest of their lives. Barbara was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 1969, and after a brief illness, died on November 12. For the next two years, Clark continued to teach, edit, and lecture locally until he was diagnosed with cancer in January 1971. He resigned from the University of Nevada in June and died on November 10. He was laid to rest beside Barbara in the Masonic Cemetery in Virginia City.”
Below is a short quote by Walter Van Tilburg Clark that appears in the Afterward, a commentary by Walter Prescott Webb, at the end of Clark’s novel, The Ox-Bow Incident, published by The New American Library in 1960:
The book was written in 1937 and ’38, when the whole world was getting increasingly worried about Hitler and the Nazis, and emotionally it stemmed from my part of this worrying. A number of the reviewers commented on the parallel when the book came out in 1940, saw it as something approaching an allegory of the unscrupulous and brutal Nazi methods, and as a warning against the dangers of temporizing and of hoping to oppose such a force with reason, argument, and the democratic approach. They did not see, however, or at least I don’t remember that any of them mentioned it (and that did scare me), although it was certainly obvious, the whole substance and surface of the story, that it was a kind of American Naziism that I was talking about. I had the parallel in mind, all right, but what I was most afraid of was not the German Nazis, or even the Bund, but the ever-present element in any society which can always be led to act the same way, to use authoritarian methods to oppose authoritarian methods.
What I wanted to say was, “It can happen here. It has happened here, in minor but sufficiently indicative ways, a great many times.”
http://www.onlinenevada.org/about-one
Excerpt from Van Tilburg Clark biography “The Ox-bow Man: A Biography of Walter Van Tilburg Clark”, by Jackson J. Benson – The Move to Missoula –
For an interesting article on one of the men hanged in Missoula by the vigilantes see the link below to information on Alex Carter. The article was written by Alex Carter’s friend – James W. Watt an authority on the gold days and packing gold all over the Northwest.