Nancy Hale (May 6, 1908 – September 24, 1988) was an American novelist and short-story writer. She received the O. Henry Award, a Benjamin Franklin magazine award, and the Henry H. Bellaman Foundation Award for fiction.
Early life and education
Nancy Hale was born in Boston on May 6, 1908. Her parents, Philip Leslie Hale and Lilian Westcott Hale were both painters, and her father was the son of famed speaker and Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale.
Nancy Hale began writing at an early age, producing a family newspaper, the Society Cat, at age eight, and publishing her first story, "The Key Glorious," in the Boston Herald, at age eleven. She also devoted considerable energy to the study of art under her parents' tutelage.
She graduated from the Winsor School in 1926 and studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and under her father at the Fenway Studios.
Career
Early career
In 1928, Hale moved to New York City with her first husband, where she was hired to work in the art department at Vogue. She was, however, almost immediately put to work as an assistant editor and writer instead. Under the pen name Anne Leslie, she wrote "chatty news" items, fashion news, and editorials. She began writing as a freelancer as well, providing articles and short stories to Scribner's, Harper's, The American Mercury, and Vanity Fair. Her first piece for The New Yorker was published in 1929. Her first novel, The Young Die Good, was published by Scribner's in 1932. Her editor, Maxwell Perkins, called it "a trifle" about Manhattan life but said that "she meant it to be." In 1933, one of her stories,"To the Invader," won the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize. Her second novel, Never Any More, published in 1934, was about the antagonism of three girls whose mothers are friends.
Hale was hired by the New York Times as its first woman straight news reporter in the spring of 1934, a job which she left after an exhausting six months.
In 1935, she published her first collection of short stories, The Earliest Dreams.
Life in Charlottesville
Hale settled in Charlottesville, VA, in 1936 with her second husband.
In 1942, Hale published her best-selling book, The Prodigal Women, also about three women—two sisters from the South and their friend from New England. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Orville Prescott wrote, "Nancy Hale's clever short stories long have been one of the star attractions in The New Yorker" and that her "knowledge of the inner workings of her fellow-women's minds is almost appalling." At over 700 pages, it was by far her longest work, and its publication followed by the longest interruption to Hale's writing career, resulting from an emotional breakdown. She would later publish a novel, Heaven and Hardpan Farm (1957), based in part on her experience of recovery and psychiatric treatment.
In 1951, she published her fourth novel, The Sign of Jonah, about a Vermont girl's married life in Virginia, and in 1955, her third collection of short stories, The Empress's Ring. Most of the stories in this collection, as well as those in The Pattern of Perfection (1961) and the semi-autobiographical pieces in A New England Girlhood (1958), were published in The New Yorker. She once claimed to have sold the magazine a record number of stories in one year (12) and eventually published over 80, placing her among The New Yorker's most prolific fiction authors.
During this period, she also wrote two plays, "The Best of Everything" (1952) and "Somewhere She Dances" (1953), which were produced at the University of Virginia's Minor Hall Theatre. She also delivered a series of lectures at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1959 and 1960 that she later published in The Realities of Fiction (1963).
Her fifth novel, Black Summer (1963), recounted the experiences of a child sent to live with strict Christian relatives. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Beverly Grunwald wrote that Hale "has taken a 7-year-old boy and penetrated truly and conscientiously into his mind and spirit." Her last, Secrets (1968), was described as a "semi-fictional memoir" in The New York Times and categorized as young adult fiction by the Saturday Review.