The Watchful God And Other Stories (Western Literature Series)

Rating:
Summary: Contains at least one classic short story
Review: Here are a few sentences from a short article that appeared Nov 21, 2004 in the Washington (DC) Post BOOKWORLD. It was this article that made me interested in this book.

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In the 1950s Walter Van Tilburg Clark seemed on his way to becoming a major American writer, both a popular and a critical success. His first and third novels, "The Ox-Bow Incident" and "The Track of the Cat", were made into movies. And one of his short stories, "The Wind and the Snow of Winter," an elegy for freewheeling days on the Western frontier that still has few equals, was an immediate classic. ... Today Clark, who died in 1971, is at least in print: all three novels, along with "The Watchful Gods and Other Stories", the collection in which "The Wind and the Snow of Winter" appears. But he has become an in-crowd kind of writer, championed by a Stendhalian happy few, such as Wallace Stegner, and otherwise getting little attention.