Walter van Tilburg Clark

Martin Kich (Wright State University)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 3 Aug 1909
Died 10 Nov 1971
Activity 1929-1950

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Poet
Story-writer

Resources

Clark's Works

Save to Bookshelf

Walter Van Tilburg Clark is one of the major figures among that first generation of Western American novelists to achieve national recognition for their work. Although a few Western writers, most notably Willa Cather, had built national reputations in the first half of the twentieth century, the region that includes the Great Plains, the high mountain country of the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas, the Great Basin, and the desert Southwest was generally denigrated as a cultural and literary backwater. Reacting against the romantic formulas of the “Western” popularized by Owen Wister and Zane Grey, novelists such as Clark, Vardis Fisher, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Wallace Stegner, and Frank Waters sought to redefine Western history and geography within the public imagination and thereby to create…

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1047 words

Citation: Kich, Martin. "Walter van Tilburg Clark". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=897, accessed 21 November 2024.]