To Escape the Dollar

A FEW YEARS before the United States entered the World War, James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff separately were occasional contributors to the Atlantic Monthly. This was not enough to make them famous, nor a living. Only Nordhoff seemed to care at the time about living. In 1916 he was in the tile manufacturing business in California. James Norman Hall that same year miraculously returned alive to London. He had enlisted in 1914 as a British machine gunner and had gone to Belgium with England's first army. The Germans called this army "The Contemptibles," and practically annihilated it. Hall was an American Grinnell College Ph. D. to, but luck, not his citizenship or college, had kept him from dying in Flanders.

Nordhoff in 1916 gave up business in California to go with a batch of American college men as an ambulance driver in the French army. At nearly the same time shortly after this Hall and Nordhoff joined the famous Escadrille Lafayette. Thus, they met, became fast friends, and risked death daily over the German lines. In 1918 both were transferred to the United States air service in France. Nordhoff received the Croix de Guetter Hall was shot down and remained a German prisoner until the Armistice.

After the war it was natural that Nordhoff should return to Boston. He had been a quiet Harvard man who played a guitar and mandolin and read a good deal. James Norman Hall, the lowan, came to Boston with him. Both hated business and post war America, and liked writing and fishing. They therefore settled in Tahiti in 1920, wrote the history of the Lafayette Flying Corps and a novel, Falooms of France.

In 1931 the editor of the Atlantic Month's helped them find an ace, the true story of the mutiny on H. M. S. Bounty in 1780. This resulted in the amazing trilogy, Mutiny on the Bountry. Mon Against the Sea, and Pitcairn's Island. For movie rights to Mutiny and Pitcairn's Island they received a total of . They had gone to Tahiti to escape a dollar civilization, but they wanted $60,000 for , their last book, and got it. It costs only vell to live in Tahiti, this sum being the price of a fishing license but their movies made so much money for Hollywood that they had to keep from being exploited. They live on opposite sides of Papecte, meet once a week to discuss their writing and great wealth.