The Ox-Bow Incident

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The Ox-Bow Incident is a 1940 western novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, in which two drifters are drawn into a lynch mob to find and hang three men presumed to be rustlers and the killers of a local man.
Clifton Fadiman, writing an introduction to the Readers Club edition, called it a "mature, unpitying examination of what causes men to love violence and to transgress justice," and "the best novel of its year." In 1943, the novel was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated movie of the same name, directed by William A. Wellman and starring Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan.
The Ox-Bow Incident was Clark's first published novel.