Oakley Hall, prolific novelist, author among others of Downhill Racers and Warlock - both taken to the movies - and celebrated teacher of creative writing, died in Nevada City (Nevada). He was 87 years old and died of cancer and kidney failure.
He was born in San Diego, but grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, where his mother moved after divorcing. As a teenager he did all kinds of jobs, from waiting tables to cutting sugar cane, until he entered the University of Berkeley. Upon graduation, with World War II raging, he became a Marine.
After the war, he moved to New York and studied at Columbia University. But his life as a writer had already begun: in two weeks he wrote his first novel, Murder City, which he managed to publish in 1949. Crime and mystery were his main literary allies, although he was also famous for the novels he set in the Wild West. American, such as The Bad Lands, The coming of the kid, Apaches and Separations.
However, the best known is Warlock (1958). Defined by the writer Thomas Pynchon as "one of our best American novels, it is the scene of a complex network of moral and personal conflicts that several gunmen and frontier men are faced with in a city in the far west, Warlock".
The plot was so cinematically constructed that Hollywood immediately saw a possible movie and before the year of its publication, the film was released, starring Richard Widmarck and Henry Ford. The book became a cult work and a music group even named the writer after the work in his honor.
Another of the many novels written by this man intrigued, among other things, by personality conflicts, was Downhill Racers, whose film starred Robert Redford, a successful skier in constant conflict with his coach, who was played by Gene Hackman.
Sometimes he liked to sign under pseudonyms like O. M. Hall or Jason Manor and, constantly searching for new plots for his work, he also came to explore psychological drama in works like Lullaby. In various mystery works, he used the character of the journalist Ambrosie Bierce as the protagonist, although he did not create a literary icon like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe.
For two decades, until he decided to retire in 1990, Oakley Hall directed the creative writing program at the University of California, in which the celebrated Michael Chabon and Richard Ford studied among others. In addition to his fictional novels, he wrote two works aimed at helping new writers and a libretto for an opera.