Remembering Max Hall

Return to main article:

Max Hall died in Cambridge on January 12 at 100 years of age. He was a writer, teacher of writing, journalist, editor of scholarly books, and for many of his many years, a contributing editor of this magazine. Each of his numerous articles was a model of the ABCs of good journalism: accuracy, brevity, and clarity. His books include The Charles: The People's River, which grew out of a cover article for the magazine; An Embarrassment of Misprints: Comical and Disastrous Typos of the Centuries; and Harvard University Press: A History.

Max was employed as a journalist in Atlanta, New York, and Washington, D.C., including nine years with the Associated Press. He was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1949-50 for his labor reporting. In 1960 he came back to Cambridge with his family for a long stint at Harvard University Press as social sciences editor. He brought his editorial skills and Southern manner to the task of persuading academics that they could improve their writing. He had successes. He was a member of the board of directors of this magazine in the mid 1990s, and an incorporator from 1992. When he was a director, he volunteered to take the minutes of board meetings, and did so with such accuracy, brevity, and clarity that when his two terms had expired, the board asked him to stay on as clerk on an informal basis, which he did. An obituary notice appears on page 56P.

~The Editors

You might also like

Reparations as Public Health

A Harvard forum on the racial health gap

Unionizing Harvard Academic Workers

Pay, child care, workplace protections at issue 

Should AI Be Scaled Down?

The case for maximizing AI models’ efficiency—not size

Most popular

Diagnosis by Fiction

The “Healing Quartet,” by “Samuel Shem,” probes medicine—and life.

AWOL from Academics

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

Who Built the Pyramids?

Not slaves. Archaeologist Mark Lehner, digging deeper, discovers a city of privileged workers.

More to explore

Darker Days

The current disquiets compared to Harvard’s Vietnam-era traumas

Making Space

The natural history of Junko Yamamoto’s art and architecture

Spellbound on Stage

Actor and young adult novelist Aislinn Brophy