Oakley Hall was born in 1920 in San Diego and grew up there and in Honolulu. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Hall joined the Marine Corps and was stationed in the Pacific during the Second World War. Following the war, he continued his studies in France, Switzerland and England, returning to the US to receive an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Hall published his first book, Murder City, in 1949, and went on to write more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction. Best known for his novels set in the Old West, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 with his revelatory novel Warlock. Hall was director of the writing programme at the University of California, Irvine, for twenty years and among his many honours are lifetime achievement awards from the PEN Center USA and the Cowboy Hall of Fame. He passed away in 2008.
