Thomas Willard Clark was born March 1, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois to Arthur Willard, an artist, and Rita Mary Clark. He attended John Carroll University and graduated with a BA from the University of Michigan in 1963. He received an MA from Cambridge University in 1965 and performed some graduate study at the University of Essex.

From 1963-1973 Clark served as poetry editor for the Paris Review. In 1966-1967 he was an instructor in American poetry at the University of Essex, and he was an instructor in poetics at the New College of California starting in 1987. Clark was also senior writer for Boulder Monthly from 1978-1979. He received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1963-1965, a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1967-1968, a Guggenhime fellowship in 1970-1971, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1985.

Clark had an extensive list of poetry publications, including the collections When Things Get Tough on Easy Street: Selected Poems, 1963-1978 (1978), Paradise Resisted: Selected Poems, 1978-1984 (1984), Sleepwalkers Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1967-1991 (1992), and Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems (2006). Themes in his poetry included sports, parodies, tributes, and politics. He also wrote some biographies, including an autobiography and works about Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Jack Kerouac; as well as some nonfiction and fiction and a three-act play entitled The Emperor of the Animals.

Clark has received numerous awards for his work, including the Hopwood Prize from the University of Michigan in 1963 and both the Bess Hokin Prize (1966) and the George Dillon Memorial Prize (1968) from Poetry. Tom Clark passed away August 17, 2018.

The Paris Review, a literary magazine for fiction and poetry, was founded by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953 in Paris, France. The founders wanted to emphasize creative works over criticism, which they thought was dominating most literary magazines of the time. The first publisher was Sadri, or Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan. The magazine has included numerous interviews with writers, notably in the "Writers at Work" interview series. In 1973 the magazine's offices moved from Paris to New York City, where it remains.