Word: clark
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that in the years to come we shall look back on this undertaking [the Marshall Plan] as the dividing line . . . between the old era of national suspicion, economic hostility and isolationism, and the new era of mutual cooperation to increase prosperity throughout the world." ¶Appointed Mrs. Georgia Neese Clark, 49, Democratic National Committeewoman from Kansas, as Treasurer of the United States. A former actress, later a bank president and storekeeper in Richland, Kans., Mrs. Clark got her reward for political labors: $10,000 a year, use of a limousine, the pleasure of seeing her signature* on all U.S. folding...
With his two previous books, "The OxBow Incident" and "The city of Trembling Leaves," Walter Van Tilburg Clark began to rejuvenate the American west as a setting for upper-middle brow literature. In "The Track of the Cat," a simple adventure story with deep psychological undertones, he continues this project...
...killed his brother. This man is the real master of the family, the hunter, the bully, the realist who has scoffed at his brothers for believing the tales of their old Indian handyman about a black panther as big as a horse who can't to killed with bullets. Clark really hits his stride in the description of curt's gradual disintegration under the onslaught of snow, time, hunger, fatigue, fear, and his own imagination. The long, magnificently told story of curt's hunt is undoubtedly the best part of the book...
...clear, or even partially clear, what this symbol is supposed to mean. Does it exist only in the minds of the men who fear it, or does it represent a malignant spirit which wants to drive them out of the valley? Whatever his concept of the black panther was, Clark doesn't carry it through. Therefore, one begins to suspect that the black cat is only literary device for effectively creating a ghostly mood to overhang the Bridges family's internal strife. I don't think that ws the original idea, but by leaving his purpose open to such speculation...
Nevertheless, "The Track Of The Cat" is a deeply engrossing bock. What Clark misses by his indefinite allegory and also by his sometimes tedious portrayal of petty details (endless scenes of housework in the ranch kitchen for instance) he makes up for in his absolutely unsurpassed descriptions of the mountains, the storm, the break-up of a strong man under stress, and the general atmosphere of coldness, loneliness and terror...