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Life and work
James Hall
1793–1868
The Ohio Valley finds a literary spokesman.
Soldier, judge and editor, Hall wrote from a West that was becoming a country of towns, courts, river traffic and print. The frontier in his books is a remembered world already being gathered into history.
Virginia in the 1790s: a young stranger rides into the settled world of the planter aristocracy, while in the mountains and canebrakes of Kentucky the Harpe brothers make the borderlands a place where no traveller rides safe. Hall sets a romance of planters and pioneers against the darkest legend of the Kentucky frontier.
His career connects public institutions with literary culture. He helped give western experience a place on the page while taking part in the civic and commercial life around him.
Explore the life and work
Origins and early years
Military service in the War of 1812 preceded his legal and public career in Illinois. Cincinnati later became the centre of his work.
The course of a life
Editing and historical writing accompanied the work of a lawyer, judge and banker. Such a life placed Hall among the institutions through which the region understood and promoted itself.
The literary work
Romance of Western History brings anecdote, memory and historical narration together. The title names a method as well as a subject: a past made vivid by the selection and shaping of a storyteller.
The legacy
Hall preserves the voice of an expanding regional culture. His books show how a frontier became a remembered historical landscape.
