Therefore, he wrote a story about vigilantism and the rush to carry out what passed as frontier justice and law and order in the minds of the vigilantes, which in the case of the “incident” in the title, culminates in a tragic miscarriage of justice. In this, his debut novel (1940), Walter Van Tilburg Clark set out to write a typical western story, one that had been told many times before, but he wanted to rewrite the formula that popular novelists such as Zane Grey and Max Brand had used with great success, a formula that had placed limitations on how the story of the West could be told.

One more novel that needs to be added to that list is The Ox-Bow Incident. The reason that all readers can enjoy these books is because they are literary westerns, meaning that they are historical fiction that happens to be set in the American West. He, like Jones and Kelton, specialized in novels about the American West, but it is safe to say that it was his epic story of the cattle frontier, Lonesome Dove (winner of a Pulitzer Prize), that more than any other western ever published captured the imagination of people who did not ordinarily read westerns. Guthrie who wrote The Big Sky, The Way West (winner of a Pulitzer Prize), and These Thousand Hills, which collectively told the story of the American West from mountain man, to western migrant, to cattle rancher. Jones and Elmer Kelton specialized in the western genre, but they nevertheless wrote a few books that non-western aficionados could appreciate – as did A.B. And there are others.Ĭharles Portis’s only western, True Grit, falls into that category as does John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, his only foray into the American West. However, the great thing about Doctorow’s only western is that it is also a book for readers who love westerns. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times that “this is the western for all those readers who don’t think they like westerns.” Another friend, Diane, commented on her own review of the book that “t’s a western for people who don’t like westerns.” My friend Phyllis wrote in her review of E.L.

The ox bow incident novel