Hall, N(orman) John 1933–

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HALL, N(orman) John 1933–

PERSONAL: Born January 1, 1933, in Orange, NJ; son of Norman C. and Lucille (Hertlein) Hall; married Marianne E. Gsell, October 13, 1968; children: Jonathan. Education: Seton Hall University, A.B., 1955, M.A., 1967; New York University, Ph.D., 1970.

ADDRESSES: Home—44 W. Tenth St., New York, NY 10011. Office—Department of English, Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, Bronx, NY 10453. E-mail—nhall@email.gc.cuny.edu.

CAREER: New York University, New York, NY, part-time lecturer in English, 1967–70; Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, Bronx, NY, assistant professor, 1970–75, associate professor, 1975–78, professor of English, 1978–. New School for Social Research, lecturer, 1970–74; Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, professor, 1980–; City University of New York, distinguished professor, 1983–.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America.

AWARDS, HONORS: Research awards from American Council of Learned Societies, 1973, and City University of New York; fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1974, Guggenheim Foundation, 1977 and 1984, and American Council of Learned Societies, 1980.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Anthony Trollope, The New Zealander, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1972.

Salmagundi: Byron, Allegra, and the Trollope Family, Beta Phi Mu (Pittsburgh, PA), 1975.

Trollope and His Illustrators, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1980.

(Editor) The Trollope Critics, Barnes & Noble (Totowa, NJ), 1981.

(General editor) Selected Works of Anthony Trollope, 62 volumes, Arno Press (New York, NY), 1981.

(Editor, with assistance of Nina Burgis) The Letters of Anthony Trollope, Volume 1: 1835–1870, Volume 2: 1871–1882, Stanford University Press (Palo Alto, CA), 1983.

(Editor) Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1985.

(Curator and contributor of essay) A Peep into the Past: Max Beerbohm Caricatures, Hunter College (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor) Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Circle (new and enlarged edition), Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1987.

Trollope: A Biography, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor and author of introduction) Anthony Trollope, Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor and author of introduction) Anthony Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) Max Beerbohm, A Christmas Garland, new illustrated edition, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1993.

Max Beerbohm Caricatures, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1997.

Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002.

Contributor to literature journals.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A study of the American Catholic intellectual ghetto.

SIDELIGHTS: A renowned expert on British novelist Anthony Trollope and British writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, N. John Hall has taught at Bronx Community College for over three decades and has published numerous books on his chosen fields of research. The editor of the standard work on Trollope's personal and public communications, The Letters of Anthony Trollope, Hall has also published well-received biographies on both Trollope and Beerbohm.

Hall has edited numerous publications dealing with the nineteenth-century author Trollope, including the 1972 publication of an unpublished manuscript, The New Zealander. Written in 1855 and rejected by Trollope's publisher, the book waited over a century for publication. "We can be grateful to Hall for bringing it to the light," wrote Ruth Roberts in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "for his careful and useful editing and annotating, [and] for a sensible introduction that adumbrates the main relationships between this and other works." John N. Hunter, reviewing the same title in English Language Notes, found the novel "a strange and welcome book and also a bookman's true delight." Hunter also praised Hall's "excellent introduction."

With Trollope and His Illustrators, Hall examines the fifteen novels of Trollope's total of forty-seven that were illustrated, discussing artists such as John Everett Millais, F. M. Holl, and George Housman Thomas, and including eighty-three illustrations. "Readers of Trollope will welcome this latest work by N. John Hall, as much for its intelligent commentary as for the reproduction of many of the illustrations," wrote Andrew Wright in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Wright further noted that Hall's "comments are clear and helpful."

In 1983 Hall published The Letters of Anthony Trollope, a two-volume offering of 1,826 letters that is "as fine a scholarly edition of letters as I have seen," according to James R. Kincaid, writing in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Kincaid dubbed "admirable" the "richly detailed and fascinating annotations" in the book. Kincaid further commented: "As the world's leading Trollope scholar, Hall has made available to us, as no one else could, not only a myriad of facts but also of possibilities. This edition will make happy hunting for the ever increasing and increasingly subtle band of Trollope scholars." Similarly, Steven Gill, writing in the Review of English Studies, felt that Hall "has done a splendid job and … I found these beautifully presented letters continuously interesting and in the end unexpectedly moving."

Hall's long awaited life of Trollope, Trollope: A Biography, appeared in 1991. A difficult subject for such a treatment, Trollope felt that the personal life of an author was no business of biographers and thus left little information on the subject other than his own comments. What Trollope did leave was an enormous shelf of fiction works. For Jonathan Loesberg, writing in Modern Philology, Hall's biography "gives us a mode of connecting what we know of the life to the fiction." According to Loesberg, "Hall has impressive command of the evidence Trollope has left us. He uses to great effect the knowledge he has gained as editor of Trollope's letters." But for Loesberg, "the least effective part of Trollope is its direct treatment of the fiction, largely because Hall insists on finding quite unpersuasive and tenuous connections between it and Trollope's life." Acknowledging the difficulty at getting to the private Trollope in her Nineteenth-Century Literature review, Juliet McMaster noted that none of the previous biographers "has come as close as N. John Hall to getting at that inner life." McMaster also praised the manner in which Hall "provides an amplitude of background that fleshes out the plot and adds to the interest" of various novels by Trollope. "Other biographers will be hard put to improve on this life," McMaster concluded. And Judy Mimken, in a starred Library Journal review, found the book a "scholarly, well-researched, well-written biography," as well as an "excellent introduction to the novels."

Hall has also turned his hand to writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm in several books. His 1997 Max Beerbohm Caricatures examines the illustrations of this man known for his wit, charm, and ability to get a caricature right with a biting comic edge. "The collection of drawings presented by Mr. Hall covers Beerbohm's victims thoroughly," noted a contributor for the Atlantic Monthly. Larger in scope is Hall's 2002 biography, Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life. Hall takes as his starting point the fact that Beerbohm wished to keep his private life to himself; thus the biographer focuses, as a contributor for Publishers Weekly commented, "on his public life and his writings and drawings" in a series of brief essay-like chapters written in a "conversational" tone, as Matthew Sturgis commented in the Times Literary Supplement.

The ultimate Edwardian dandy, Beerbohm lived from 1872 to 1956 and included among his friends and acquaintances most of intellectual London, from Oscar Wilde to Virginia Woolf. "In the end," added the Publishers Weekly critic, "This is a biography about an ingeniously sycophantic man who had a talent for acquiring fabulously interesting, brilliantly clever friends." Victoria Glendinning, reviewing the biography in the Spectator, observed that Hall provides a "lucid account" and is "writing as an enthusiast, and conversationally." Robert L. Kelly of Library Journal called the book an "intriguingly conceived biography [that] reads like a familiar letter." Valentine Cunningham, writing in the New York Times Book Review, dubbed the book an "attractively spry romp around Beerbohm's life and repute," while Paul Johnson, reviewing the work in London's Sunday Telegraph, called it a "delightful book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America, October 14, 2002, Peter Heinegg, review of Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life, p. 28.

American Scholar, fall, 1992, C. A. Latimer, review of Trollope: A Biography, pp. 620-622.

American Spectator, April, 1992, D. Lyons, review of Trollope, pp. 66-68.

Atlantic Monthly, January, 1998, review of Max Beerbohm Caricatures, p. 105; November, 2002, Benjamin Schwarz, review of Max Beerbohm, pp. 108-109.

Choice, May, 1992, review of Trollope,; March, 1998, review of Max Beerbohm Caricatures; March, 2003, review of Max Beerbohm.

English Language Notes, September, 1975, John N. Hunter, review of The New Zealander, pp. 66-69.

English Studies, June, 1986, William Baker, review of The Letters of Anthony Trollope, pp. 277-279.

Library Journal, August 1, 1991, Judy Mimken, review of Trollope, p. 100; November 1, 2002, Robert L. Kelly, review of Max Beerbohm, pp. 88-89.

Magill Book Reviews, February 1, 1992, John Powell, review of Trollope.

Modern Philology, August, 1974, Keith Cushman, review of The New Zealander, pp. 96-100; May, 1994, Jonathan Loesberg, review of Trollope, pp. 536-539.

New Criterion, November, 2002, John Gross, review of Max Beerbohm, pp. 85-88.

New Leader, December 1, 1997, Richard Lamb, review of Max Beerbohm Caricatures, pp. 16-17.

New York Times, December 10, 2002, Richard Eder, review of Max Beerbohm, p. E8.

New York Times Book Review, January 19, 2003, Valentine Cunningham, review of Max Beerbohm, p. 22.

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, March, 1973, Ruth Roberts, review of The New Zealander, pp. 472-477; March, 1978, Andrew Wright, review of Byron, Allegra, and the Trollope Family, pp. 476-482; December, 1981, Andrew Wright, review of Trollope and His Illustrators, pp. 368-372; December, 1983, Robert M. Polhemus, review of Selected Works of Anthony Trollope, pp. 350-351; September, 1984, James R. Kincaid, review of The Letters of Anthony Trollope, pp. 217-222.

Nineteenth-Century Literature, September, 1992, Juliet McMaster, review of Trollope, pp. 240-243.

Publisher Weekly, October 14, 2002, review of Max Beerbohm, p. 74.

Review of English Studies, August, 1985, Stephen Gill, review of The Letters of Anthony Trollope, pp. 446-447; May, 1994, Sheila M. Smith, review of Trollope, pp. 27-271.

Spectator, November 2, 2002, Victoria Glendinning, review of Max Beerbohm, p. 65.

Sunday Telegraph (London, England), October 13, 2002, Paul Johnson, review of Max Beerbohm, p. 16.

Times Literary Supplement, December 20, 2002, Matthew Sturgis, review of Max Beerbohm.

Victorian Studies, summer, 1982, George Butte, review of The Trollope Critics, pp. 502.