A Little Land and a Living Bible: Bolton Hall’s Blue-Penciled Version

ABSTRACT While scholarship on the Bible’s reception in the United States has frequently engaged with modern translations of the text, the popularity of abridged Bibles during the first half of the twentieth century represents an overlooked chapter of this history. This essay takes up one of these shortened Bibles, The Living Bible (1928), edited by the lawyer and back-to-the-land advocate Bolton Hall, as a window into the larger significance of these abbreviated versions for American religious history. Though not a biblical scholar or clergyman, Hall was confident that he had successfully condensed the substance of the canon into a text a third of its size, which he proudly proclaimed as the first “readable” Bible. Together with Hall’s other abridgment projects and his advocacy for single-tax proposals, this Bible reflects a larger optimism in this period about the power of simplification—what the historians Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters aptly call the “culture of happy summary.” This article examines Hall’s condensed canon in relationship to his advocacy for the simplification of government and his abridgment of other classics by Henry George and Leo Tolstoy as artifacts of a hope shared by many in this period that the truths of an increasingly complex world could be reduced without remainder.