BY Jason Emerson
editor
Walter Van Tilburg Clark may not be a name that evokes immediate recognition for most people, but the title of Clark’s first novel, The Ox-Bow Incident, is much more familiar. The book, published in 1940, was considered one of the top books of that year, was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Henry Fonda in 1943, was adapted to a stage production in 1976 and still is taught in high schools and colleges across the U.S.
While the novel is a Western (a genre which turns off many readers), it is often considered to be the first modern Western novel in that it eschewed the typical clichés and formulaic plots of the genre, and transcended into something more. Part of the book’s mass appeal is that its themes are universal — it is a morality tale about justice, law and mob violence that can fit into any genre, Clark just had a preference for the West.
And did you know that Clark lived in Cazenovia and taught English at Cazenovia High School when he wrote the book?
The Ox-Bow Incident is the story of two drifters who are drawn into a lynch mob to find and hang three men presumed to be cattle rustlers and the killers of a local man. When the mob comes across three riders and assumes their guilt in the face of unwavering pleas of innocence, the posse must decide what is the truth, how will justice be honestly served and how will they live with themselves based on the decisions they make?
As one description states, the book “examines law and order as well as culpability.” Clark’s biographer, Jackson J. Benson, more simply states that the author and his book “turned the ‘gallop and gun’ popular Western on its head.”
Clark was in his early 20s when he began writing his Western novel during a cold, snowy winter in Cazenovia in 1937. Born in Maine, Clark had grown up in Reno, Nevada, where he went to college and lived until the early 1930s. His wife, Barbara, was from Elmira, N.Y., where the couple wed in 1933. In 1935, the couple moved to Cazenovia after Clark accepted a job teaching English at Cazenovia High School. The job had been offered to Clark by his brother-in-law Wayne Lowe, who had just become the district superintendent — a district that had only been created three years earlier by consolidating into one building students from the various single schoolhouses throughout the area.
The Clarks lived in Cazenovia for the next 10 years, in houses on Green Street, East Lake Road, 19 Albany St. and 31 Fenner St., according to historic Cazenovia phone directories and biographies. According to the 2004 book, “The Ox-Bow Man: A Biography of Walter Van Tilburg Clark,” by Jackson J. Benson, Cazenovia had about 800 students in grades K-12 in the 1930s. While there, Clark taught English and coached the basketball and tennis teams, and was faculty advisor to the drama club.
According to Benson, Clark was well-liked and respected by his students. Clark called teaching, “an occupation I respect so much and am so fond of that it’s kept me from doing anything like as much writing as I should have.” Clark’s most productive years in terms of both writing and publishing were during the 1930s and 1940s. “Thus, in Cazenovia from 1935 to 1945, he produced much of his writing while teaching high school, including two of his three published novels,” according to the biographer.
Clark began writing The Ox-Bow Incident during Christmas vacation in 1937 and completed the first draft over Easter vacation 1938; he also completed another draft over Christmas vacation 1938-39. Clark later told an interviewer he completed his first draft of the novel in one month, but revisions took two years. “It isn’t the writing … it’s the rewriting,” he said.
Clark later said his first draft of the book was an attempt to “do for the popular western with its myths and clichés what Cervantes did in burlesquing the chivalric romances of 17th century Spain in Don Quixote,” according to Benson. He wanted to show the absurdity of the “two-gun cowboys stuffed with Sunday school virtues, and heroines who could go through a knock-down without getting a curl misplaced” and influence people to stop reading “such junk,” he said.
Clark said that in his revisions he decided to tackle the heavier issues of fascism and totalitarianism that he was seeing in Italy and Nazi Germany in the build-up to World War II, and relate it to the American West and how the Indians were treated by white men.
The book came out in 1940, published by Random House, and was a universal success both critically and commercially.
The New Yorker’s Clifton Fadiman said The Ox-Bow Incident was his “unwavering choice for the year’s finest first novel. It has many of the elements of an old-fashioned horse opera — monosyllabic cowpunchers, cattle rustlers, a Mae West lady, barroom brawls, shootings, lynchings, a villainous Mexican. But it bears about the same relation to an ordinary western that The Maltese Falcon does to a hack detective story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it’s sort of what you might call a masterpiece.” (Fadiman, Clifton. “Make Way for Mr. Clark,” The New Yorker, October 12, 1940.)
The Cazenovia Republican newspaper announced the publication of the book “by a member of the English faculty at the Cazenovia Central School,” and quoted a review from the New York Herald Tribune calling the book “a new version of an old style of Western lynching bee. There is the required amount of excitement in this tale with a familiar theme but it stands by itself for its high grade of psychological and expert craftsmanship.”
Three years after the publication of his first novel, Clark saw his creation come to the silver screen in a Hollywood version of The Ox-Bow Incident, starring Henry Fonda, Mary Beth Hughes and Dana Andrews. On October 15, 1943, the picture premiered at the Town Hall Theatre in Cazenovia, where it was so packed with people that “Mr. and Mrs. Clark, arriving a little late on Friday night, were unable to get seats and left the theatre without seeing the picture,” according to reporting in the Republican. The movie was ultimately nominated for an Academy Award for best picture.
After the publication of The Ox-Bow Incident, Clark became famous and his writing came to be in high demand in major magazine publications, but he continued to teach in Cazenovia — working by day and writing late into the night. His second novel, “The City of Trembling Leaves,” (1945) a semi-autobiographical account of a sensitive boy growing up in Reno, Nev., also was written in Cazenovia; while his third novel, “The Track of the Cat,” (1949) about a Nevada cattle ranch threatened by a mountain lion, was written elsewhere. Both of those books were also made into movies, but neither the books nor their film counterparts achieved any sort of success comparable to The Ox-Bow Incident.
Clark also wrote short stories and poetry as well as novels; his short fiction earned him five O. Henry Prizes from 1941 to 1945, also while he lived and worked in Cazenovia. In 1950 he published his final book, a collection of short stories titled, “The Watchful Gods.” Until his death in 1971, according to the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, Clark “wrote furiously but published little.”
After moving away from Cazenovia in 1945, Clark taught English at the University of Montana in Missoula, at San Francisco State College and at the University of Nevada at Reno, where he served as writer-in-residence from 1962 until his death in 1971 of cancer. He also directed creative writing workshops and seminars at colleges and universities throughout the west.
While most in Cazenovia do not realize or remember this historic literary connection to their community, the Cazenovia Public Library does. The library carries all three of Clark’s novels, as well as Benson’s 2004 biography, “The Ox-Bow Man.” If you want to read more by or about Walter Van Tilburg Clark, go check them out.
A full bibliography of Clark can also be found on the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame website at guides.library.unr.edu/nvwriters-hall-of-fame/clark-1988.
