James B. Hall was a prolific author and a distinguished teacher at the University of Oregon. Hall wrote more than 20 books—novels, short stories and poetry—and was widely published and anthologized. He founded the creative writing program at Oregon and also taught at the University of California-Irvine and University of California-Santa Cruz. He was a co-founder of the Northwest Review, the UO literary magazine. His students and proteges at UO included Ken Kesey and Barry Lopez.