Hall, Oakley 1920- (O.M. Hall, Oakley Maxwell Hall, Jason Manor)

PERSONAL:

Born July 1, 1920, in San Diego, CA; son of Oakley M. and Jessie Hall; married Barbara Edinger, June 28, 1945; children: Oakley III, Mary, Tracy, Sara. Education: University of California, Berkeley, B.A., 1943; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1950. Politics: Democrat.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Olympic Valley, CA. Agent—Don Congdon Associates, 177 E. 70th St., New York, NY 10021.

CAREER:

Writer, educator. University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, staff member, 1950-52; Squaw Valley Community of Writers, founding director, 1969, executive director, 1986—; University of California, Irvine, writer-in-residence, 1967-69, professor of English, 1968-90, director of programs in writing, 1968-89, professor emeritus, 1990—. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1939-45.

MEMBER:

San Francisco Writers Round Table, Squaw Valley Community of Writers (Olympic Valley, CA; member of board of directors).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Pulitzer Prize nomination, 1958, for Warlock; Silver Medal, Commonwealth of San Francisco, 1958; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1975, 1979; Golden Spur, Western Writers of America, 1982; Wrangler Award for magazine piece "How the River Roars"; National Cowboy Hall of Fame, 1989; San Diego Historical Society's Author Award, 1997; PEN Center USA West Award of Honor, 1998.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Murder City, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1949.

So Many Doors, Random House (New York, NY), 1950.

The Corpus of Joe Bailey, Viking (New York, NY), 1953, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1984.

Maridios Beach, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1955.

Warlock, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1958, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1980, University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 1996, New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2005.

The Downhill Racers, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1963, Charles Scribner's Sons (New York, NY), 1988.

The Pleasure Garden, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1966.

A Game for Eagles, Morrow (New York, NY), 1970.

Report from Beau Harbor, Morrow (New York, NY), 1971.

The Adelita, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1975.

The Bad Lands, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1978.

Lullaby, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1982.

The Children of the Sun, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1983.

The Coming of the Kid, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1985.

Apaches, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1986.

Separations, University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 1997.

Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1998.

Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings, Viking Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Ambrose Bierce and the One-eyed Jacks, Viking Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls, Viking Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots, Viking Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Love and War in California, Thomas Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2007.

NOVELS; UNDER PSEUDONYM JASON MANOR

Too Dead to Run, Viking (New York, NY), 1953.

The Red Jaguar, Viking (New York, NY), 1954.

The Pawns of Fear, Viking (New York, NY), 1955.

The Tramplers, Viking (New York, NY), 1956.

OTHER

The Art and Craft of Novel Writing, Writer's Digest Books (Cincinnati, OH), 1989.

How Fiction Works: The Last Word on Writing Fiction, from Basics to the Fine Points, Story Press (Cincinnati, OH), 2001.

Also author of libretto for Angle of Repose, an opera based on the book by Wallace Stegner, 1976.

Contributor of short stories to Playboy and to TriQuarterly, Antioch Review, and other literary magazines.

ADAPTATIONS:

Warlock was filmed by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1959; The Downhill Racers was filmed by Paramount in 1969 as Downhill Racer with Robert Redford.

SIDELIGHTS:

Oakley Hall writes historical and contemporary novels, generally with Western settings, about people who face ordinary and extraordinary challenges. He has written dozens of novels since the beginning of his authorial career in 1949, making his first breakthrough with the 1958 novel, Warlock, adapted for a feature film of the same title. Reissued in 2005, that "brilliant, complex take on the American western," according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "more than stands the test of time." Here Hall establishes many of the themes he has worked out through his continuing oeuvre, including the relativity of morality and the ubiquity of violence in the Old West. He also presents a group of colorfully repugnant characters in this early novel, a recurring motif in his work. Warlock features Clay Blaisedell, a gunslinger who is hired to bring order to a mining town. However, his penchant for relying on his fast gun soon lands him in trouble. The Publishers Weekly critic called this work a "revelatory novel."

Hall's 1971 novel, Report from Beau Harbor, "never sacrifices the humanity of its characters to shallow opportunism," Bernard Weinstein noted in Best Sellers. Weinstein further commented that Hall "perceives this country in depth as well as in breadth … [cutting] deeply into the marrow of upper-middle-class America with the scalpel of skepticism." Martin Levin, writing in the New York Times Book Review, contended that "[Hall] establishes a painfully recognizable social climate … bound together with a storyteller's sense and an adhesive of bitter humor," while Book World reviewer Sara Blackburn observed that "Hall … has a rare gift for depicting those moments during which people grow and change."

The Bad Lands, set in Dakota Territory during the 1880s, deals with range wars and the influx of the small farmers and ranchers into the territory. Ross Thomas of the Washington Post noted that "although he tries very hard indeed, Hall does not quite capture either the essence or the flavor of the time and place about which he writes." Newsweek reviewer Peter S. Prescott took a more positive position, commenting: "The great pleasure … of any mythic fiction is that we already know the story before we have begun it: We read for confirmation."

In his depiction of a troubled couple reunited in Lullaby just before their son falls from a bridge and faces possible permanent brain damage, Hall ventures into a world of black magic and ancient curses. This horror story, wrote Rick DeMarinis in the Chicago Tribune Book World, is "an impressive novel by a master of the form. It is a tale rich with believable characters involved in an occult detective story that keeps the reader on edge…. Oakley Hall … has given us a strong moral allegory for our times." However, Richard Rhodes, writing for the New York Times Book Review, found the novel "too earnest to be taken simply as entertainment and a little too mechanical to be taken completely seriously…. Like its title, Oakley Hall's book swings somewhere between a bedtime story and a serious attempt to pierce the human and cultural darkness." In the Los Angeles Times, Roger Dionne commented: "Mostly the novel is about guilt and the confrontation of past sins…. However, the themes don't mesh; they remain out of focus; and held together with such tenuous mythological threads, they carry little conviction." The Washington Post Book World contributor Christopher Schemering pronounced it "all very dark, psychological, insular … and without a cathartic conclusion, finally tedious."

In The Children of the Sun, Hall creates a fictionalized epic of the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca and three of his men, survivors of the expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez, a rival of Cortes, in the American Southwest and Mexico. These men have become healers and defenders of the Indians that the Conquistadores had brutalized, but they are unable to work any lasting good for them in the face of Spanish greed for gold. David M. Walsten stated in the Chicago Tribune Book World: "Oakley Hall is a facile storyteller, but there is precious little here to relieve his accounts of slaughter, brutality, torture, venereal agonies, and disfigurement or death by smallpox, historic or otherwise." Washington Post writer Robert W. Smith gave Hall good grades for accuracy of detail and noted that "his prose moves, though he has a tendency to overwrite and lacks the restraint that lies just this side of art…. But on its own terms as a sprawling saga with little sag, this is an enjoyable reading adventure for a long summer afternoon." Diane Cole, writing for the New York Times Book Review, declared: "Doomed quests are the stuff that heroic tales are made of, and in The Children of the Sun Oakley Hall has transformed the feats of real-life adventurers into an adventurous and impressive fiction." Grover Sales of the Los Angeles Times called attention to Hall's "exhaustive knowledge of Mexican history and folklore, a superb literary style and a burning passion for his subjects that sears on every page." Sales further commented: "Hall is among our most absorbing, as well as our most underrated, novelists."

Hall also focuses on the time period of Billy the Kid. In The Coming of the Kid, Hall satirizes the legendary Billy the Kid, naming his villain Big Mac, which Detroit News reviewer Robert Mayer found distracting and irritating. Further, Mayer noted, "Trying at once to be a tall tale, an adventure, a comic novel and an allegory, The Coming of the Kid succeeds at none of these. The characters never come to life; the concept has been done better."

Apaches, which also involves a Billy the Kid-like character, is filled with Indians and cowboys, cavalry and Mexicans, strong-willed women and a hero who searches for a better life in the old west. As Matt Schudel observed in the Washington Post Book World: "Hall does not really rise beyond the genre of the western novel, and Apaches is at least 100 pages too long, but he writes with clarity and a clipped eloquence…. Writing like that knocks the boots off Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey, and by creating solid characters in a gritty, believable world, Oakley Hall gives formula fiction a good name."

In his 1997 novel, Separations, Hall sets up another elemental battle in the west: that between developers and preservationists, dealing with a trip down the Colorado River, following the expedition of John Wesley Powell at the Grand Canyon. A mining magnate mounts the new expedition in an attempt to discredit Powell and those who would preserve the Grand Canyon. The expedition also creates something of a nineteenth-century media circus when it is announced that one of its avowed aims is to rescue a white woman taken captive by Native Americans. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Andy Solomon disparaged the book's "wooden dialogue," but also went on to note that "the novel succeeds admirably at depicting some grave stains upon the national character."

The prolific Hall has also fashioned a historical detective series featuring the acerbic writer Ambrose Bierce. The opening title of that series, Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades, has Bierce, aided by the narrator, a young San Francisco reporter, hunting down a local Jack-the-Ripper type of killer who leaves a queen of spades on the bodies of the women he murders. Booklist reviewer Budd Arthur had high praise for this novel, observing that Hall "does more here than blend fact with fiction to tell an entertaining tale." For Arthur, this is "as much a historical novel as it is a mystery." Bierce and his sidekick Tom Redmond take on the annexation of Hawaii in Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings, while in Ambrose Bierce and the One-eyed Jacks they investigate murders at the behest of the powerful and wealthy publisher William Hearst. Reviewing the latter title, a Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded: "Hall keeps all pots boiling and in concert right to the end." Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls finds the detecting pair involved with suffragettes and the shooting death of a local preacher with a roving eye for the ladies. A critic for Kirkus Reviews termed this a "lively period romp with particularly good work by Bierce and Tom en route to a surprising solution." In Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots Bierce and Redmond find themselves investigating the murder of the owner of a Wild West show. For Booklist reviewer David Pitt, this was a "snappily written yarn."

Hall moves into the twentieth century with his 2007 novel, Love and War in California. The novel follows the fortunes of Payton Daltrey through the trials and tribulations of World War II, beginning in the days following Pearl Harbor. A final section of the novel, set forty years later, looks at Daltrey as a successful author. A critic for the New Yorker thought this narrative device "works brilliantly." For a Publishers Weekly reviewer this was a "sure-handed" effort, with a story that is "eminently enjoyable for its splendid detail." However, the same reviewer also felt that the character of Daltrey "never quite comes off the page."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Twentieth-Century Western Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1991.

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, fall, 1989, Suzann Bick, review of The Art and Craft of Novel Writing.

Best Sellers, November, 1971, Bernard Weinstein, review of Report from Beau Harbor, p. 355.

Booklist, September 15, 1998, Budd Arthur, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades, p. 204; September 1, 2001, Carrie Bissey, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings, p. 56; March 15, 2005, David Pitt, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots, p. 1269.

Book World, January 2, 1972, Sara Blackburn, review of Report from Beau Harbor, p. 2.

Chicago Tribune Book World, May 16, 1982, Rick DeMarinis, review of Lullaby; June 26, 1983, David M. Walsten, review of The Children of the Sun.

Christian Science Monitor, November 2, 1984, James Kaufmann, review of The Corpus of Joe Bailey, p. 10.

Detroit News, February 16, 1986, Robert Mayer, review of The Coming of the Kid.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2001, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings, p. 1069; December 1, 2002, review of Ambrose Bierce and the One-eyed Jacks, p. 1736; November 15, 2003, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls, p. 1342; February 15, 2005, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots, p. 201.

Library Journal, October 15, 1996, review of Warlock, p. 94; June 1, 1997, Charlotte L. Glover, review of Separations, p. 148; November 1, 1998, Rex E. Klett, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades, p. 128.

Los Angeles Magazine, April, 2007, Robert Ito, review of Love and War in California, p. 100.

Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1982, Roger Dionne, review of Lullaby; July 7, 1983, Grover Sales, review of The Children of the Sun, p. 9.

Newsweek, June 5, 1978, Peter S. Prescott, review of The Bad Lands, p. 98.

New Yorker, May 14, 2007, review of Love and War in California, p. 149.

New York Times Book Review, October 17, 1971, Martin Levin, review of Report from Beau Harbor, p. 34; May 14, 1978, review of The Bad Lands, p. 12; March 28, 1982, Richard Rhodes, review of Lullaby, p. 15; October 23, 1983, Diane Cole, review of The Children of the Sun, p. 24; December 23, 1984, review of The Corpus of Joe Bailey, p. 24; July 20, 1997, Andy Solomon, review of Separations.

Publishers Weekly, April 21, 1997, review of Separations, p. 61; September 17, 2001, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings, p. 57; January 20, 2003, review of Ambrose Bierce and the One-eyed Jacks, p. 60; December 8, 2003, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls, p. 50; March 7, 2005, review of Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots, p. 53; October 10, 2005, review of Warlock, p. 36; October 30, 2006, review of Love and War in California, p. 31; January 1, 2007, "PW Talks to Oakley Hall: Love, War, Rock and Roll: A Veteran Author Assesses a Reissue, His Latest Novel and the Namesake Band," p. 29.

Roundup Magazine, December, 1996, review of Warlock, p. 26; October, 1997, review of Separations, p. 30.

Sewanee Review, July, 1990, review of The Art and Craft of Novel Writing, p. 515.

Washington Post, May 20, 1978, Ross Thomas, review of The Bad Lands; August 9, 1983, Robert W. Smith, review of The Children of the Sun, p. C4.

Washington Post Book World, March 7, 1982, Christopher Schemering, review of Lullaby; August 8, 1986, Matt Schudel, review of Apaches.