Oakley Hall - Career

Career

His books focus primarily on the historical American West. His most famous book, Warlock, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958. The film adaptation of the same title was directed by Edward Dmytryk. In Thomas Pynchon's introduction to Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, Pynchon stated that he and Fariña started a "micro-cult" around Warlock. Another novel, The Downhill Racers was made into a film starring Robert Redford in 1969.

After the death of Wallace Stegner, Hall was considered the dean of West Coast writers, having supported the early careers of California novelists such as Richard Ford and Michael Chabon, both graduates of the well-known writing program at the University of California, Irvine where Hall taught for many years, and Amy Tan, his student from The Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hall's colleagues at Irvine included Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and fellow Iowa graduate Charles Wright and poet and Victorian Scholar Robert Peters. San Diego—and Hall's one-time San Diego neighborhood of Mission Hills—serve as focal points of two novels: "Corpus of Joe Bailey" and his 2007 novel "Love & War in California."

Hall died May 12, 2008, in Nevada City, California. Among his many honors are lifetime achievement awards from the PEN American Center and the Cowboy Hall of Fame. He was also the father of the playwright Oakley "Tad" Hall III and writer, actor and director Sands Hall.