James Norman Hall Papers

Table of Contents

Introduction

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

Container List

* Boxes 1-2 Correspondence
* Boxes 3-4 Correspondence
* Boxes 5-11 Miscellaneous (clippings, notebooks, photographs, etc.)
* Boxes 12-24 Manuscripts of published books
* Boxes 25-26 Manuscripts of stories, essays, poems
* Boxes 27-29 Microfilms of selected correspondence and manuscripts
* Box 30 Laurence Winship donation
* Memorabilia

Appendix A: Index of microfilms

Appendix B: Scarlet & Black References to Hall

Introduction
The papers of James Norman Hall, 1887-1951, Grinnell graduate of 1910, writer of poetry, essays, short stories, and novels, were given to Grinnell College by his son, Conrad L., and daughter, Nancy Rutgers, in 1957. The estates of two close Boston friends, Roy Cushman and George C. Greener, augmented the collection in 1963 with donations of letters and a few manuscripts and rejection slips, and several other friends gave their letters from Hall to the Archives. The collection is in 26 archives boxes covering about ten linear feet of shelves.

Literary rights of the unpublished materials are held by Mr. Hall's heirs; photocopies of these writings may be made only with permission of the heirs. Materials in the collection, including microfilms, may be examined at Grinnell College Archives in Burling Library.

Suggested citation: James Norman Hall Papers, Grinnell College Libraries Department of Special Collections, Ms. 01.01.

Biographical Note
Apr. 22, 1887 Born in Colfax, Iowa
1904 Graduated from high school. Visited St. Louis Exposition
1904-06 Worked in clothing store in Colfax
1906-10 Student at Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa
1908 Summer school at University of Chicago
1909 Summer in Scotland
1910 Graduated from Grinnell College
1910-14 Boston. Agent for Society for Prevention to Cruelty To Children. Friendship formed with Roy M. Cushman, George C. Greener, Laurence L. Winship.
May 1914 Bicycle trip through Great Britain
Aug. 18, 1914 London. Enlisted on British Expeditionary Force as Private in 9th Battalion Royal Fusiliers (Lord Kitchener's Volunteer Army--the First Hundred Thousand)
Aug. 1914-May 1915 Army training in England. Became machine gunner.
May-Nov. 1915 Machine gunner in Normandy, France
Sept.-Oct.1915 Battle of Loos
Dec. 1, 1915 Discharged from British Expeditionary Force. Returned to U. S. Met Ellery Sedgwick, editor of Atlantic Monthly
Jan.-Apr. 1916 Wrote Kitchener's Mob
Summer 1916 In London with Greener
Sept. 1916 Paris. Gathering information for articles on Lafayette Escadrille for Atlantic Monthly
Oct. 16, 1916 Paris. Enlisted in Lafayette Escadrille
Oct. 1916-June 1917 Aviation school at Buc, later at Avord.
June 14, 1917 Went to the front (near Soissans), in Squad 124
June 26, 1917 Wounded seriously in plane crash
June-Sept. 1917 American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly
Sept. 1917 Returned to action, rank of Sergeant
Sept. 1917 Crashed on Vosges mountain, broke nose
Feb. 7, 1918 Transferred to 94th (and later to 103rd) Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Air Service with rank of Captain
May 7, 1918 Shot down behind German lines near Pagny-sur-Moselle taken prisoner
May-July15,1918 In German hospital with broken ankle and nose
July 15-Nov. 16, 1918 In various prisons in Germany, the last being Schloss Trausnitz in Landshut, Bavaria
Nov.16, 1918 Allowed to "escape" from prison, train to Munich, Lindau, through Switzerland to Paris
Nov. 1918 Paris. Met Nordhoff. Both commissioned to write history of Lafayette Escadrille
Mar. 1919 Returned to U.S.
Summer 1919 Martha's Vineyard with Nordhoff. Wrote The Lafayette Flying Corps
Fall 1919 Lecture tour
Jan. 1920 Nordhoff and Hall sailed from California to Tahiti, arrived Feb. 1920
1920-21 Voyages in South Seas on copra schooners. Nordhoff and Hall published Faery Lands of the South Seas
April 1922 Left Tahiti for U.S. and Iceland
Aug. 1922-Feb. 1923? Iceland
Summer 1923 Returned to Tahiti
1925 Married Sarah Winchester
1926 Son, Conrad Hall, born
1929 Nordhoff and Hall began Mutiny on the Bounty
Aug. 1930 Nancy born in San Diego. Visits to U.S. about every two years, usually staying several months in Calif.
April 1947 Santa Barbara, Calif. Nancy's marriage to Nicholas Rutgers. Nordhoff's death.
June 1950 Grinnell College, 40th reunion, received honorary degree
July 6, 1951 Tahiti. Died of cardio-vascular ailment Author of:
Kitchener's Mob: The Adventures of an American in Kitchener's Army. 1916
High Adventure: A Narrative of Air Fighting in France. 1918
The Lafayette Flying Corps (editor with Nordhoff). 1920
Faery Lands of the South Seas (with Nordhoff). 1921
On the Stream of Travel. 1926
Mid-Pacific. 1928
Falcons of France: A Tale of Youth and the Air (with Nordhoff) 1929
Flying with Chaucer. 1930
Mother Goose Land. 1930
Mutiny on the Bounty (with Nordhoff). 1932
Men Against the Sea (with Nordhoff). 1934
Pitcairn's Island (with Nordhoff). 1934
The Tale of a Shipwreck. 1934
The Hurricane (with Nordhoff). 1936
Dark River (with Nordhoff). 1938
The Friends. 1939
Oh, Millersville! (By Fern Gravel, pseud.) 1940
No More Gas (with Nordhoff). 1940
Doctor Dogbody's Leg. 1940
Botany Bay (with Nordhoff). 1941
Men Without Country (with Nordhoff). 1942
Under A Thatched Roof. 1942
Lost Island. 1944
The High Barbaree (with Nordhoff). 1945
A Word for His Sponsor: A Narrative Poem. 1949
The Far Lands. 1950
The Forgotten One and Other True Tales of the South Seas. 1952
Her Daddy's Best Ice Cream. 1952
My Island Home. 1952
Also numerous magazine pieces, 1914-52
Details of Hall's life are in his autobiography, My Island Home

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Scope and Content Note
The James Norman Hall papers at Grinnell College span the years 1906-54. About half the collection is correspondence, clippings, photographs, and notebooks, the other half is manuscripts of his writings, including his autobiography, novels, short stories, essays, and poems, published and unpublished.
The 665 letters and post cards are arranged chronologically. A small portion are from Hall's four years in Boston before World War I; nearly half are from World War I and post war years; the rest from the last 25 years of his life. Much of the correspondence is with his family and two Boston friends, George Courtright Greener (1911-53), Director of the North Bennet Street Industrial School, and Roy Cushman (1914-50), Probation Officer in Juvenile Court; other correspondence includes letters and cards from Hall to his former Grinnell professors, Charles Payne (1916-44) and George L. Pierce (1911-50), from his college roommate, Chester C. Davis (1910-19), newspaperman, head of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in the 1930's and president of the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, and a few letters from Ellery Sedgwick, editor of Atlantic Monthly. The Atlantic Monthly-Hall-Nordhoff correspondence is on 14 rolls of microfilm, and the Sedgwick-Hall correspondence is on one roll in the Archives. A few letters are exchanges between friends with comments about Hall. Some letters are typed, some are carbons, most are handwritten. A typed version of selected war letters is included. The Archives does not have Robert Dean Frisbie's letters on which Hall's story "Frisbie of Danger Island" is based nor correspondence with Nordhoff.

Most of the newspaper clippings are reports of Hall's war experiences and reviews of his books, a few are about Hall, Tahiti, and the South Seas. Most photographs are from World War I and his Iceland trip, a few are of his family in Tahiti.

Twenty-eight small handwritten notebooks, some of which record Hall's travels and outlines of stories and poems, a diary of the 1909 Grinnell College Glee Club tour to the west coast, and Hall's Grandfather Young's small Civil War diary (1864) are also in the collection. Two rolls of microfilm in the
Archives contain war letters, pages of notebooks and other items selected from the Grinnell collection by Paul Briand Jr., who wrote a biography of Hall. (See Appendix A for details. )

Over half of the collection consists of typescripts, some with revisions or several versions of sections, of nine of the twelve books Nordhoff and Hall co-authored (manuscripts of the first three, published before 1930, are not in the collection), of parts or all of seven of the seventeen books Hall published alone, of scripts of two of Hall's plays, of typescripts or holograph versions of 19 of the more than 80 published magazine pieces, and of about sixty unpublished poems, stories, and essays, most undated. The Archives owns 28 of Hall's and Nordhoff and Hall's published books, including foreign language editions of some titles.

The Hall papers at Grinnell College are a valuable resource for anyone studying his career as a writer, his travels, experiences, ideas, and the sources of some of his stories. Hall's war correspondence is particularly enlightening for the World War I scholar interested in the human aspect of the war.

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