Walter Van Tilburg Clark's "The Ox-Bow Incident" is your correspondent's 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 Western 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….

"The Ox-Box Incident" is not so much a story about a violent happening as a mature, unpitying examination of what causes men to love violence and to transgress justice. What lends the book an unusual touch—almost a touch of genius—is the way in which everything that is important in it revolves around the Walter Van Tilburg Clark 1909–1971 Special Collections, University of...