Their names breathe of the South Seas — in fiction and in fact.
Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Norman Hall are forever linked by one of the great popular collaborations in American letters. Their names conjure Tahiti, the open Pacific, and above all the Bounty — and their first editions have been sought by collectors of sea fiction and modern literature ever since. This collecting guide preserves the account the house long offered of the two authors and their work.
Charles Bernard Nordhoff (1887–1947)
Nordhoff was born in England of American parents, raised in southern California, and educated at Stanford and Harvard. He drove an ambulance in France in 1916 and later joined the Escadrille Lafayette, the famous squadron of American volunteer fliers, where he met a fellow airman named James Norman Hall. Disenchanted with the postwar world, in 1920 the two moved to the tropical island of Tahiti, where they would remain for many years. Nordhoff's first book, The Fledgling (1919), is an account in diary form of his flying experiences; The Pearl Lagoon and Picaro both appeared in 1924, and The Derelict (1925) was the last book he wrote alone.
James Norman Hall (1887–1951)
Novelist, short-story writer, historian, and memoirist, Hall was an Iowa native and a graduate of Grinnell College who began his adult life as a social worker in Boston. He served in both the British and American armies during the First World War; his plane was shot down over enemy lines and he became a prisoner in Germany. Out of that generation's experience — and out of the friendship formed in the Escadrille — came one of the most productive partnerships in twentieth-century fiction.
The Bounty Trilogy
From 1925 until Nordhoff's death the two wrote together, and their collaboration produced the books for which they are remembered above all: the Bounty Trilogy — Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Men Against the Sea (1934), and Pitcairn's Island (1934). Drawn from the historical record of the celebrated 1789 mutiny, the trilogy became an international sensation, was translated the world over, and was carried to still wider fame by the cinema. First editions of the three volumes — especially in fine dust jackets — are the cornerstone of any Nordhoff and Hall collection.
Collecting Nordhoff and Hall
Beyond the trilogy lies a substantial body of work, together and apart: South Seas adventures, the memoir of the Lafayette Flying Corps, and Hall's later autobiographical writing. Because the books were popular and widely reprinted, first printings in bright jackets are scarcer than the totals suggest, and condition — as our Glossary stresses — is everything. The field connects naturally to the wider literature of voyages and the sea and to modern first editions generally.