Music Lesson, by Martha Lacy Hall

Martha Lacy Hall

Martha Lacy Hall was born in Magnolia, Mississippi, on August 19, 1923, to William and Elizabeth Lacy, the youngest of five daughters in a family of six. She was educated at Whitworth College for Women in Brookhaven, Mississippi. In 1941 she married Robert Sherrill Hall, Jr., an electrical and mechanical engineer, with whom she had three children. She has worked for the Memphis Press-Scimitar. In 1968 she became an editor at the Louisiana State University Press and in 1979 became a managing editor. Two years later she published her first collection of short stories, Call It Living.

Following her retirement as managing editor, she published in 1984 a second collection, Music Lesson, which received a number of positive reviews, including one from fellow Mississippi writer Walker Percy, who wrote, "Martha Hall's stories are quiet, well crafted, and deceptive — deceptive because under the calm surface, as peaceful as Main Street in Magnolia, Mississippi, on a Sunday afternoon, lurk the secret and sometimes terrible motions of the human heart. She writes in many voices, a school-girl's, a housewife's, a World War II vet's, yet they are all her own." Her most recent short story collection, The Apple Green Triumph, was published in 1990. The title story received an O. Henry Award in 1991. She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.