Research Services Archivist
Sponsor
Through a National Endowment for the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant awarded in 2018, the project "P.S. Write Again Soon": Revealing 200 years of the American Mosaic through the Wade Hall Collection of American Letters has focused on making available the materials in the collection through publishing of collection guides and digitization of select collections.
Who is Wade Hall?
Wade Hall (1934-2015) was a native of Union Springs, Alabama. He was the first in his family to graduate high school and went on to earn a BS from Troy State University, an MA from the University of Alabama, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. In the mid-1950s, he served in the U.S. Army in Germany for two years. In 1962, he arrived in Louisville, Kentucky to head the Kentucky Southern College English department and in 1969, he moved to Bellarmine University where he taught English and chaired the English and Humanities programs for 30 years. He also taught at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida. In 1971, he met his life partner, Gregg Swem, a journalist. Dr. Hall was the author of twenty-four books and numerous monographs, articles, plays, and reviews relating to Kentucky, Alabama, and Southern history and literature. He also edited the Kentucky Poetry Review and hosted the long-running interview show “Wade Hall’s Kentucky Desk” on KET’s Louisville affiliate.
Select Publications by Wade Hall
Waters of Life from Conecuh Ridge by Publication Date: 2003Clyde May was the patriarch of a family from rural Bullock County, Alabama. He was a devoted father, a war veteran, and a churchgoer. He was also a moonshiner. This memoir, based on oral history interviews with May's son, Kenny, explores May's life and his passion for making good whiskey despite the risk of going to jail. Now the family tradition is taking a new twist, as Kenny and his siblings have established Alabama's first legal distillery to bottle and sell a distinctive whiskey based on the late Clyde May's recipe. "Transcribed from audio tapes by Greg Swem and rewritten and reformatted by Wade Hall. The narrator is Kenny May"--Pg. 9. Includes index.
Conecuh People: Words of Life From the Alabama Black Belt by Publication Date: 2004This volume is an intimate collection of oral history interviews that captures the lives of the people who were once the backbone of the rural South, in this case from Bullock County, Alabama. The interviews are elevated to art by the skill of the interviewer/author, a native, who left the area after high school and became a college professor and well-known author in Kentucky but always maintained his roots in the community where he grew up.- A Song in Native Pastures: Randy Atcher's Life in Country Music byPublication Date: 2002Biography. 172 pages; illustrations.
An Interview with Abraham Lincoln by Publication Date: 2010Author Wade Hall has taken Abraham Lincoln's actual words from speeches, articles, and letters and assembled them in the form of answers to questions posed in an imagined interview with a fictional young journalist recently returned from the war front. The result is a fresh look at the mind and philosophy of our sixteenth president and the issues he was grappling with as the war came to a close, just a few days before he was assassinated. Fiction. 88 pages; illustrations.- The High Limb: Poems byPublication Date: 1973Poetry. "First collection of Wade Hall's poems." --t.p. verso. Poets of Kentucky series, no. 5. 56 pages.
The Rest of the Dream: The Black Odyssey of Lyman Johnson by Publication Date: 1988In The Rest of the Dream, Lyman Johnson, grassroots civil rights leader, tells his own story. All four of Johnson's grandparents were slaves in Tennessee. Yet his father was a college graduate, principal of a black school, and the inspiration for his son's love of justice. Lyman Johnson was born in 1906 during the darkest days of segregation. He learned from his father not to sit in the "crow's nest" reserved for blacks in his hometown movie theater. This refusal to accept second-class citizenship became a guiding principle in Johnson's life. Johnson was almost forty-three when he won admission to graduate study at the University of Kentucky in 1949. Crosses were burned on campus. Because of his family commitments, he returned to his teaching position in Louisville and never completed his doctorate. Thirty years later the university that fought to keep him out awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree. Johnson earned his doctorate the hard way -- by saying no to the crow's nest and other marks of inequality. Johnson's graphic recall of people and incidents and his storyteller's talent for narrative make this record of a unique American life filled with suspense, humor, tragedy, and triumph.- High Upon a Hill: A History of Bellarmine College byPublication Date: 1999"While Bellarmine is young, it has had a long history." In his 1990 inaugural address as Bellarmine University's third president, Dr. Joseph "Jay" McGowan, pointed to a key paradox at the heart of this venerable academic Louisville institution. Although opened at mid-century in 1950, Bellarmine rose with roots much deeper into the past. No one was more conscious of this truth than the leaders of the Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville who called it into existence, and its founding president, the youthful Fr. Alfred F. Horrigan.Two predecessor institutions in Kentucky, St. Joseph's and St. Mary's Colleges took their rise in the 1820s; both were deeply impacted by the Civil War; and both produced an impressive list of graduates from throughout the South, many of whom were destined for high civic positions. The very land on which Bellarmine would be built had itself already been home to seven institutions: a plantation, a Civil War hospital, a bishop's home, two seminaries and two orphanages. Additionally, a special educational partner, Louisville's Ursuline College, tracing its own roots to the 1920s, has its own vivid and worthy history to report. Ursuline and Bellarmine would merge in 1968, becoming co-educational, with a Board of Trustees that added a significant number of lay and interfaith members.This volume, In Veritatis Amore - In the Love of Truth, invoking the institution's founding motto - sets out to give a concise rendering of key elements of this storied past as well as major developments and personalities in Bellarmine's nearly seventy years of academic and community life. It seeks to evoke the values and ethos that make Bellarmine, to so many of its 23,000 alums, a singular home. Here is the saga of an infant college with a single structure that barely survived its first year, through its new status of university in 2000. Moving into the 21st century, Bellarmine emerged into a regional scholastic center with international range and nearly 4,000 students. All that story is reported here, along with a chapter on Bellarmine sports, and with a wealth of photographic detail.
