Donald Hall was not only one of America’s poet laureates but one of the great personal essayists. “If any American writer deserves the description of ‘man of letters,’” the New York Times Book Review wrote, “it is Donald Hall.” Mr. Hall approached writing as he approached life—with simplicity, affection, and a wry wit. He distilled the human experience with a sense of humor that readers will return to again and again, each time learning something new. His work glows with the affection he held for the land, the people, and the customs of rural New England, and especially for the small, New Hampshire dairy farm near Ragged Mountain he visited every summer as a child. Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, and managing editor of Life magazine. Among his books, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history, and Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition was honored by the American Historical Association as 2011’s best book of American history. Okrent lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.