Dr. Frederick Dunn Donald Hall Collection
This collection of poetry, novels, articles, and broadsides of the works of
Donald Hall was donated to Western Michigan University by Dr. Frederick Dunn,
avid collector and admirer of the poetry of Donald Hall. Dr. Dunn was a schoolmate
of Hall's both at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Harvard University.
Donald Hall (1928- ) began writing as an adolescent, even attending the Bread
Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of 16. He attended both Harvard (B.A. 1951)
and Oxford (B. Litt. 1953) before he became a professor at the University of
Michigan. It was there at the University of Michigan he met his wife and fellow
poet Jane Kenyon (1947-1995). In 1957 Hall quit his job and moved back to New
Hampshire, to the farm that was settled by Hall's great-grandfather in 1865.
He has authored over 15 volumes of poetry, over two-dozen textbooks and anthologies,
and several books of prose. Hall has written, apart from poetry, several books
on baseball, on the sculptor Thomas Moore, on the poet Marianne Moore, children's
books such as The Ox Cart Man (1979), which won the Caldecott Medal,
short stories, and plays.
Hall has received several awards through out his lifetime. He has received two
Guggenheim fellowships, won the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Silver
medal, received a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and
Publishers Project, and won the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. He also served as
Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989.
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