Background

James was born on April 22, 1887, in Colfax, Iowa, United States; the son of Ella Annette Hall (Young), and Arthur Wright Hall. Hall’s upbringing in a small prairie hamlet was fairly typical of his era.

Education

James attended the local schools in Colfax, Iowa, United States. In 1900 he graduated from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. He wrote the song "Sons of Old Grinnell, " which is part of the college songbook.

After graduation, Hall became a social worker in Boston, Massachusetts, for the Society for Prevention to Cruelty To Children while trying to establish himself as a writer and studying for a master's degree from Harvard University.

Career

James worked at various part-time jobs, including handyman and clerk in a local dry-goods store. His attachment to that locale is evident from the many references to it in his writings. His life in the South Seas was not an exile from that background but a distinctive attempt to hold to the reflective and serene pace he valued and which seemed to him threatened by the frenetic hubbub of modern machinery and materialism.

During his boyhood, already under the spell of reading and dreaming of a career as a world wanderer and poet, surreptitious trips to nearby Grinnell on the cowcatcher of the night train were among Hall’s favorite escapades. The Grinnell College campus and the sounds of the men’s glee club had their effect on young “Norman,” as he was known at home, and he worked his way through that college as a student and graduated in 1910. He spent the following four years in Boston as a caseworker for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He left those duties in the spring of 1914 for a sojourn in England, hoping to come to terms with his ambitions as a writer. Instead, when England declared war on Germany that August, Hall enlisted as a private in the Royal Fusiliers. His experiences training as a recruit and as a machine gunner at the front resulted in Hall’s first success as an author. Discharged after 15 months of service, he received an invitation from Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic, to write a series of articles that were subsequently published as a book titled Kitchener’s Mob, in 1916.

Returning to France, ostensibly to prepare more articles for the Atlantic, reporting on Americans serving in a French flying squadron known as the Escadrille Lafayette, Hall ended up joining that dashing group of volunteers. That first encounter with the romance of flight was both thrilling and hazardous, as Hall recounts in High Adventure: A Narrative of Air Fighting in France, 1918. After both victories and misadventures in combat, Hall was shot down behind enemy lines on May 7, 1918, and spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war. Upon America’s entry into the war and the absorption of the Escadrille into the U.S. Air Service, Hall’s rank changed from sergeant to captain. He was awarded military decorations from both France and the United States.

In Paris after the Armistice, Hall was assigned to write a history of the Lafayette Flying Corps in collaboration with Charles Nordhoff, a fellow corps member. That was the beginning of a friendship that took both men to Tahiti in 1920 to pursue their writing careers, both separately and jointly. For some time Hall found it difficult to settle into the writer’s tasks, but after travels around the South Seas, then to Iceland and back to Iowa and other mainland destinations.

Resuming their collaboration, Hall and Nordhoff wrote Falcons of France, 1929, a novel for boys based on their experiences as airmen during the war. Their next joint project, far more ambitious, grew out of Hall’s suggestion that the pair undertake a fictionalized version of the events surrounding the notorious mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty in 1789. The resulting trilogy, Mutiny on the Bounty, 1932, Pitcairn’s Island, 1934, and Men Against the Sea, 1934, met with great success, especially the first volume, which has been made into at least two popular motion pictures.

Other notable products of the NordhoffHall collaboration followed, but none rivaled the Bounty novels in popularity. As Nordhoff’s energies as a writer began to ebb in later years, Hall increasingly assumed the impetus of their joint efforts and continued to publish separately and in a variety of forms: poems, essays, reminiscences. Although deeply distressed by the coming of war to the Pacific, his happy and peaceful Tahitian existence was never directly threatened by it.

While in Boston during that visit to the United States, Hall was found to be suffering from a degenerative heart condition to which he succumbed the following year at his home in Arué, Tahiti. His wife, Sarah, and their two children, Conrad and Nancy, survived him.

Achievements

• During his time in French aviation, James Hall was awarded the Croix de Guerre with five palms and the Médaille Militaire. He was awarded the French Légion d’Honneur and the American Distinguished Service Cross.

Works

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  • The Bounty Trilogy 1940
  • Under a thatched roof 1942
  • Mother Goose Land 1930
  • On the stream of travel 1926
  • A Word for His Sponsor 1949
  • Mid-Pacific 1928
  • The Forgotten One and Other True Tales of the South Seas 1952
  • The Hurricane 1937
  • No More Gas 1940
  • Falcons of France 1929
  • Faery Lands of the South Seas 1920
  • The friends 1939
  • Mutiny on the Bounty 1932
  • Men Against the Sea 1934
  • The Lafayette Flying Corps 1920
  • Kitchener's Mob 1916
  • The Far Lands 1950
  • Doctor Dogbody's leg 1940
  • Flying with Chaucer 1930
  • Pitcairn's Island 1934
  • Men Without Country 1942
  • High Adventure 1918
  • The High Barbaree 1945
  • Lost Island 1944
  • Botany Bay 1953

Connections

In 1925, James Hall married Sarah (Lala) Winchester. They had two children, Conrad Hall, and Nancy Hall-Rutgers.

Father:

Arthur Wright Hall

Mother:

Ella Annette Hall (Young)

Wife:

Sarah Teraiveia "Lala" Hall (Winchester)

Daughter:

Nancy Hall-Rutgers

Son:

Conrad "Connie" Lafcadio Hall

Conrad "Connie" Lafcadio Hall was an American cinematographer, who was best known for photographing such films as In Cold Blood, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American Beauty, and Road to Perdition.

Brother:

Fred Young Hall

Brother:

Harvey Wright Hall

colleague:

Charles Bernard Nordhoff

References

• THE CHECKLIST OF FANTASTIC LITERATURE
  1972
• Oh Millersville!
  1940
• The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs.
  2008