Description

James Norman Hall (1887-1951) was an American author. He was born in Colfax, Iowa, where he attended the local school. Hall graduated from Grinnell College in 1910 and became a social worker in Boston, Massachusetts, while trying to establish himself as a writer and studying for a Master's degree from Harvard University. Hall was on vacation in the United Kingdom in the summer of 1914, when World War I began. Posing as a Canadian, he enlisted in the British Army, serving in the Royal Fusiliers as a machine gunner. He was discharged after his true nationality was discovered, and he returned to the United States and wrote his first book, Kitchener's Mob: The Adventures of an American in the British Army (1916), recounting his wartime experiences. When the United States entered the war, Hall was made a Captain in the Army Air Service. There he met another American pilot, Charles Nordhoff. After the war, Hall spent much of his life on the island of Tahiti, where he and Nordhoff, who had also moved there, wrote a number of successful adventure books, including the Bounty trilogy, many of which were subsequently made into movies.