About the Clarks

L.D. Clark (1922-2014) grew up on a farm in the Cross Timbers region of North Texas “among elders who told stories and boys as rough and tumble as any out of Tom Sawyer.” After serving in the Army Air Corps in World War II, he obtained a PhD from Columbia University and spent a long career teaching English at the University of Arizona, producing scholarship on D.H. Lawrence, and writing novels, short stories and works of non-fiction.

Dr. Clark met his late wife LaVerne Harrell Clark (1929-2008) in a creative writing class at Columbia University. They were married in 1951. A novelist, folklorist, and photographer, Mrs. Clark obtained MA and MFA degrees from the University of Arizona, where she was the first director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She produced six works of fiction and non-fiction, and a collection of photographic portraits of 500 well-known and emerging writers, mostly Americans. Her first book, They Sang for Horses, a study of Navajo and Apache horse mythology, won the University of Chicago Folklore Prize and has been recognized by the Smithsonian Institution as a classic in Native American studies. This book is now in print from the University of Colorado Press.  A later book, Keepers of the Earth, won the Best First Novel award from Western Writers of America.

After retiring from the University of Arizona, the Clarks moved to Mrs. Clark’s home in Smithville, near farm property that had been in her family since after the Civil War. The Clarks’ decision to leave the property to Texas State “seemed the natural thing to do,” Mr. Clark said, “because of the good creative writing program here.” 

Dr. and Mrs. Clark held memberships in the Texas Institute of Letters.