A Short Biographical/Bibliographical Sketch of Wade Hall

A native of Union Springs, Alabama, Wade Hall has lived since 1962 in Louisville, where he has taught English and chaired the English and Humanities/Arts programs at Kentucky Southern College and Bellarmine University. He has also taught at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida. He holds degrees from Troy State University (B.S.), the University of Alabama (M. A.), and the University of Illinois (Ph.D.). He served for two years in the U.S. Army in the mid-fifties. Dr. Hall is the author of books, monographs, articles, plays, and reviews relating to Kentucky, Alabama, and Southern history and literature. His most recent books include A Visit with Harlan Hubbard; High Upon a Hill: A History of Bellarmine College; A Song in Native Pastures: Randy Atcher’s Life in Country Music; and Waters of Life from Conecuh Ridge.

Other writings include hundreds of articles, poems, essays and reviews published in historical and scholarly journals as well as popular magazines and newspapers. He served as editor of the Kentucky Poetry Review for more than fifteen years. For almost fifteen years he hosted a weekly interview program over WKPC-TV, the public television affiliate in Louisville. In 1967 he received the Literary Award of the Alabama Library Association for "Distinguished Contribution to Alabama's Literary Heritage." In 1988 The Rest of the Dream was recognized as one of the outstanding books published on race relations in the United States. His Conecuh People was adapted for the stage by New York playwright Ty Adams in 2001 and premiered at Troy State University in January 2002. The play is now performed each spring as a tourist attraction in Union Springs, Alabama. He is currently working on a 200-year anthology of Kentucky writing for the University Press of Kentucky, to the published in the fall of 2005.

For the past thirty years and more he has aggressively collected books about the South, picture post cards, photography, American sheet music and recordings, folk art, quilts, and American letters and diaries, including a large component of Civil War manuscripts. They are in process of being deposited at the University of Alabama, the University of Kentucky, the Kentucky History Center, Troy State University, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the J. B. Speed Art Museum, and the Columbus (Ga.) Museum.


A Selected Bibliography (Books)

Reflections of the Civil War in Southern Humor, 1962
The Smiling Phoenix: Southern Humor, 1865-1914, 1965
The Truth Is Funny: A Study of Jesse Stuart's Humor, 1970
The High Limb: Poems, 1973
This Place Kentucky, 1975
Louisville 200, 1978
The Kentucky Book, 1979
The Rest of the Dream: The Black Odyssey of Lyman Johnson. 1988
Greetings from Kentucky: A Post Card Tour, 1994
Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy, 1995
Hell-Bent for Music: The Life of Pee Wee King, 1996
A Visit with Harlan Hubbard, 1996
Passing for Black: The Life and Careers of Mae Street Kidd, 1997
Complete Conviction: The Private Life of Wilson W Wyatt. Sr.. 1997
One Man's Lincoln: Billy Herndon (Honestly) Represents Abe, 1998
James Still: Portrait of the Artist as a Boy in Alabama, 1998
Conecuh People: Words of Life from the Alabama Black Belt, 1999;rep.2005
High Upon a Hill: A History of Bellarmine College, 1999
Sacred Violence: A New Edition in Two Volumes, 2002
A Song in Native Pastures: Randy Atcher’s Life in Country Music, 2002
The Outrageous Times of Larry Bruce Mitchell (a play), 2002
Waters of Life from Conecuh Ridge: The Clyde May Story, 2003
A Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundreds Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State, 2005

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