Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1909-1971) was a strikingly versatile Western writer. Born in Maine, he grew up in and always loved Nevada. The Walter Van Tilburg Clark Companion synopsizes all of his works, identifies and comments on all of the characters in his fiction, poetry, and essays, and includes occasional critical insights, mostly from publishing scholars. Clark wrote a massive juvenile novel, The City of Trembling Leaves, and followed it with two now-classic novels, The Ox-Bow Incident and The Track of the Cat, both of which inspired spectacular movies. He also wrote prize-winning short stories. He was a devoted husband and father. When he spent too much time and energy teaching and lecturing, he suffered a writer s block decades before his death. In this Companion, a chronology presents the main features of Clark s interesting life, and a bibliography demonstrates the range of scholarship about him. Iowa-born Robert L. Gale has degrees from Dartmouth College and Columbia University. During World War II he served in the Counter Intelligence Corps of the U.S. Army Air Corps in England, France, and North Africa. He taught at American and foreign universities for forty years, has published extensively, and has written more than a dozen reference books like this one on Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Retired from the University of Pittsburgh, Gale now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.