Walter Van Tilburg Clark was a Western writer but not a Westerner by birth. Born in East Orland, Maine, on 3 August 1909, he did not see the American West until he was nine. Moreover, his father and mother were intellectual and artistic, not people of the land. These biographical matters were crucial in Clark's development, for though he may seem the quintessential Westerner as a writer, his work is also that of a sensitive man who is both inside and outside his world. In brief, his is a complex vision of a complex world.

In 1917, Clark's father, Walter Ernest Clark, was named president of the University of Nevada in Reno. Nevada was to be thereafter the center of Clark's artistic and personal life. Like the central figures of his novel, The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), Clark attended the Orvis Ring Grammar School and Reno High School. Unlike them, Clark...