PDF《Nancy Hale: A Bibliography》

1 Nancy Hale: A Bibliography Introduction Despite a writing career spanning more than a half century and marked by an extensive amount of published material, no complete listing exists of the works of Nancy Hale.

Hale is recognized for capturing both the mentality of a certain level of woman and the aura of a period, glimpsed in three distinctly different areas of the country: Boston, New York, and the South. The three locations are autobiographical, drawing first on the New England of Hale'

s birth in

1908 where she remained for her first twenty years, followed by nearly a decade in New York City while she pursued her career, and eventually shifting during the late 1930s to Virginia where she remained for the rest of her life. Those three locales that she understood so well serve exclusively as backdrops for her fiction throughout her long career. Childhood years are always critical to what we become, and Hale'

s background figures prominently in her life and her writing. She slipped, an only child, into a distinguished line of New England forebears, marked by the illustrious patriot Nathan Hale and including such prominent writers as grandfather Edward Everett Hale, author of The Man Without a Country, and great aunts Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom'

s Cabin) and Lucretia Peabody Hale (The Peterkin Papers). Her heritage connects her solidly to America'

s literary beginnings and repeatedly shapes her own writings, resulting eventually in a publisher'

s invitation to edit the significant literature of New England, which results in A New England Discovery. The second geographical site in which Hale sets her fiction, again affords a sensitive representation of an era and its players. Her glimpses of the fast-paced social life of New York City in the 1930s results in a steady stream of stories published in The New Yorker. Her more mature musings involve what is, for Nancy Hale, the somewhat puzzling world of Southern culture in which she finds herself by midlife. They are sprinkled with political and cultural satire of a more subtle nature than her earlier work. These three quite different views of America provide the backdrops on which Hale relies for her vibrant accounts. Hailed as a master of the descriptive glimpses of life apparent in her short fiction, Hale nonetheless proves on several occasions her masterful ability to handle the complexities of prolonged narrative. Nancy Hale repeatedly addresses the challenging issues of her time despite periods of mental duress aggravated by the effort. In particular, she questions the female'

s role in society during the first half of the twentieth century, challenging the social construct of woman as merely wife and mother. Additionally, Hale takes on the biases of the world, particularly apparent in her fictional comparisons of the American South to the Nazi regime of World War II. She confronts the difficult subject of mental illness and the new approaches of psychological analysis in Heaven and Hardpan Farm. Her peers recognized Hale'

s fresh approach, particularly Scribners'

iconic editor Maxwell Perkins, who claimed to intuit on meeting her that Hale could write. Her ideas

2 are fleshed in with a descriptive subtlety which belies the disputatious nature of the content. It is the power of Hale'

s description which brings the fictional moments to life. This effort lists and organizes the complete written works of Nancy Hale. Literary databases provide a limited number of entries. Hale'

s papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and the University of Virginia'