LibraryGeorge J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives

16 linear feet.

Catalog Number: M82

Series List:

• Writings -- Fiction
• Writings -- Non-Fiction
• Correspondence, personal
• Class Material
• Biographical Information and Images
• Audio Materials
• Writings of Others

Agency History / Biographical Note:
Lawrence Sargent Hall (Bowdoin 1936) was born April 23, 1915, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He taught at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts (1936-38), received his Ph.D from Yale University (1941), and taught at Ohio University in Athens (1941-42) and at Yale (1946) before becoming professor of English at Bowdoin (1946-67), retiring as Henry Leland Chapman Professor in 1986. In 1956, he was a visiting professor at Columbia University.

In addition to his academic career, Hall was appointed to the Governor's Council on the Arts & Culture in Maine (1964), served on the Maine State Commission on the Arts & Humanities (1965-68), was director of Maine Citizen's Association for Cooperative Planning (1966-69), and consultant for the Family Practice Residency Institute in Augusta (1973), developing a humanistic curriculum in medical education. He served to the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve (1942-46), first teaching for a year at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and then serving on sea duty until the war ended. He was also director of a censorship intelligence unit of the Office of Strategic Services (1942).

Hall was the author of "The Ledge" (1959), which was awarded first place in the O. Henry Prize Collection in 1960, and has appeared in more than thirty anthologies; Stowaway (1961), which won the 1961 William Faulkner Award; Hawthorne: Critic of Society (1943); How Thinking is Written (1963); A Grammar of Literary Criticism (1965); and he edited Seeing and Describing (1966). He was a contributor to Down East, Hudson Review, North American Review, The Reporter, Shakespeare Quarterly, and The Skipper.

Hall married Margaret Mellor (1938; divorced 1954), with whom he had two children, Lawrence and Marion; Marcia Skillings (1954); and Janice Tracey Nelson McCarthy (1981), who died in 1990. He died October 28, 1993.

Scope and Content:
The collection contains published and unpublished manuscripts of Hall's novels, texts, short stories, plays, articles, lectures, essays, and poems, including drafts, final copies, proofs, and notes; correspondence; class material; biographical information; clippings; photographs; and audio tapes. It documents primarily his writing career but also contains material relating to his teaching.

Cite as: Lawrence Sargent Hall Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library.
Access Restrictions: None.