Discipline: Literature

Nancy Hale

Discipline: Literature
Region: Charlottesville, VA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1956, 1957, 1958, 1974
Nancy Hale (1908-1988) was an American novelist and short-story writer. She got a job at Vogue magazine and was soon working as an assistant editor and writer under the pen-name of Anne Leslie. She began writing as a freelancer, 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." She 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 Writer's 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.

Studios

Irving Fine

Nancy Hale worked in the Irving Fine studio.

Youngstown Studio was given to MacDowell by friends of Miss Myra McKeown in Youngstown, OH, where she promoted both art and music. It was renamed Irving Fine Studio in 1972 in honor of Irving Fine, a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher who was a MacDowell Fellow during the 1940s and 1950s. The simple interior of the studio…

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