Donald Hall (1928–2018) was born in Connecticut and lived and worked on his great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire. Across more than six decades and twenty books of poetry, Hall’s New England practicality, tenacious passion, and intellectual independence marked a path for literature. His memoir Unpacking the Boxes, published on his eightieth birthday, is excerpted as “Gaudeamus Igitur” in our Library. Hall was a noted essayist, children’s book author, fiction writer, and a US Poet Laureate. Among his many publications are the essay collections Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes on Nearing Ninety.

Donald Hall

An Interview

with Pat Gage and Caitlin McKenna

A Poet Laureate and celebrated dean of American letters, Donald Hall lives in Wilmot, New Hampshire, in a farmhouse purchased in 1865 by his great-grandfather. Hall’s grandmother and mother were born in the white clapboard house, and Hall’s grandfather milked cows, kept sheep and chickens, and harvested maple syrup on the land. In a prodigious lifetime of writing, Hall has chronicled the home as a quintessential New England family dwelling and workplace.

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