Donald Hall

Author profile

born

September 20, 1928 in New Haven, Connecticut, The United States

gender

male

About this author

Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of sixteen—the same year he had his first work published. He earned a B.A. from Harvard in 1951 and a B. Litt. from Oxford in 1953.

Donald Hall has published numerous books of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); The Painted Bed (2002) and Without: Poems (1998), which was published on the third anniversary of his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon's death from leukemia. Other notable collections include The One Day (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Pulitzer Priz...more Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of sixteen—the same year he had his first work published. He earned a B.A. from Harvard in 1951 and a B. Litt. from Oxford in 1953.

Donald Hall has published numerous books of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); The Painted Bed (2002) and Without: Poems (1998), which was published on the third anniversary of his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon's death from leukemia. Other notable collections include The One Day (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination; The Happy Man (1986), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Exiles and Marriages (1955), which was the Academy's Lamont Poetry Selection for 1956.

In a review of Hall's recent Selected Poems, Billy Collins wrote in the Washington Post: "Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines."

Besides poetry, Donald Hall has written books on baseball, the sculptor Henry Moore, and the poet Marianne Moore. He is also the author of children's books, including Ox-Cart Man (1979), which won the Caldecott Medal; short stories, including Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); and plays. He has also published several autobiographical works, such as The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005) and Life Work (1993), which won the New England Book award for nonfiction.

Hall has edited more than two dozen textbooks and anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America (1990), The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes (1981), New Poets of England and America (with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, 1957), and Contemporary American Poetry (1962; revised 1972). He served as poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1953 to 1962, and as a member of editorial board for poetry at Wesleyan University Press from 1958 to 1964.

His honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Silver medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. Hall also served as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989. In December 1993 he and Jane Kenyon were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, "A Life Together." In the June 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress's fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He lives in Danbury, New Hampshire.(less)

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Books by Donald Hall

Average rating: 4.10 · 7,245 ratings · 715 reviews · 119 distinct works

	Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall, Barbara Cooney (Illustrator) 3.98 avg rating — 2,681 ratings — published 1979 — 13 editions	My rating:
	Without: Poems 4.37 avg rating — 482 ratings — published 1998 — 3 editions	My rating:
	The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon 4.27 avg rating — 199 ratings — published 2005 — 6 editions	My rating:
	White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006 4.22 avg rating — 165 ratings — published 2006 — 3 editions	My rating:
	The Painted Bed: Poems 3.89 avg rating — 143 ratings — published 2002 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Life Work 4.25 avg rating — 126 ratings — published 1993 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry 3.72 avg rating — 125 ratings — published 2008 — 3 editions	My rating:
	String Too Short to Be Saved 4.15 avg rating — 85 ratings — published 1980 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Old and New Poems 4.17 avg rating — 76 ratings — published 1990 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Claims for Poetry (Poets on Poetry 4.04 avg rating — 51 ratings — published 1983	My rating:

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Quotes by Donald Hall

“I want to sleep like the birds
then wake to write you again
without hope that you read me.”
― Donald Hall

13 people liked it

“I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~from an interview in Narrative magazine”
― Donald Hall

5 people liked it

“We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.”
― Donald Hall

4 people liked it

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