Oakley Hall, 87; Western author and writing teacher
Oakley Hall, an author and teacher whose novels set in California and environs helped define contemporary Western literature and who also helped launch the literary careers of such prominent writers as Michael Chabon, Richard Ford and Amy Tan, has died. He was 87.
Hall died Monday of complications from cancer and kidney disease at his home in Nevada City, Calif., said his daughter Brett Hall Jones.
In a richly varied and productive career, Hall wrote more than 20 novels, including "Warlock" (1958), a fictional account of the early West that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and "The Downhill Racers" (1963), about skiers in the Sierra Nevada. Both books were made into movies.
He was best known, however, as a professor of English at UC Irvine and a co-director of the school's writing program. He joined the faculty in 1968.
"Oakley was a hugely generous mentor who was very important to many writers," Michelle Latiolais, co-director of the university's programs in writing, said Thursday.
"His course on how to structure a work of fiction was legendary," said Latiolais, a former student of Hall.
He wrote several guides to fiction writing, including "The Art and Craft of Novel Writing," in 1989.
As a novelist, Hall wrote "psychological realism," Latiolais said. He often used the historical West as his setting, without the white hats and black hats.
"Warlock" is set in a California mining town where a gunslinger lawman tries to impose order. Violent gangs, murky politicians and a decent woman who is a prostitute are among the characters.
"Oakley complicated a romantic moral clarity we had about the West," Latiolais said.
She said he also helped lay the groundwork for several generations of revisionist writers, notably Cormac McCarthy, whose "Blood Meridian," a 1985 novel, follows a gang of Anglo scalp hunters in the mid-1800s.
Hall's other books include a series of mysteries featuring American satirist Ambrose Bierce as the main character. The first in the series, "Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades," was published in 1998.
Hall wrote the libretto for "Angle of Repose," an opera by Andrew Imbrie based on the novel by California writer Wallace Stegner.
As a teacher, Hall was admired, beloved and feared.
"Oakley would stay on a piece of writing, get into it on a molecular level," Chabon said Thursday.
