H. Vail Deale was born on May 14, 1915 in Baltimore, MD, the son of Henry Vail and Sarah Sisson Deale. Vail was educated at Dickinson College and DePauw University, where he received his B.A. in 1936. He also received a B.L.S. from the University of Illinois Library School in 1937, and his M.A. in English Literature from Drake University, in 1950. Vail married Jane Louise Niehaus on June 7, 1944 in Washington, D.C. She passed away on February 2, 2004.

Deale was a Conscientious Objector during World War II. The majority of his letters found in this archival collection deal with his correspondence with his fiancé and future wife Jane Louise Niehaus while he was interned in CPS Camps in Merom, Indiana, Powellsville, Maryland, and Big Flats, New York during the years 1942-1944. After the War, Deale went on to continue in his career in Academic Librarianship working primarily as the College Librarian at Beloit College in Wisconsin (1953-1980). Deale and his wife had one child named Sally. There are many letters in the collection from her to her parents while she attended college at Grinnell.

The majority of Deale's public career was at Beloit College where he served as the director of libraries starting in this role in 1953. After years of careful planning, Deale saw the completion of the Colonel Robert H. Morse Library, which opened in 1962 and was named state "Library of the Year," the first time the award went to a college library. Vail's two Fulbright awards led him to Iran, first in 1965-66, where he assisted in building the first academic library in Iran at Pahlavi University in Shiraz and met the Shah. In 1970-71 he served on the faculty at the University of Tehran. Deale wrote numerous articles for Library Journal, Wisconsin Bulletin, College and Research Libraries, and The Journal of Higher Education, among others, and was very active with the Midwest Academic Librarians Conference. He also served on the council of the American Library Association, and as president of the Wisconsin Library Association. Governor Patrick Lucey, named him to the Wisconsin Council on Library Development in 1973. During his 27 years at Beloit College, approximately fifty of Deale's students went on to careers in librarianship. In the 1960s, he worked with the Beloit Community on Human Rights, the Beloit Peace Council, and was a member of the Beloit Chapter of the NAACP. He was a charter member of the Leon Peterson Scholarship Committee, was appointed chairman of Brotherhood Week Committee in 1963, and headed the Beloit Citizens Committee for the United Nations in 1964. After retiring in 1980, Deale served on the board of the Voluntary Action Center, several minority scholarship committees, the Community Resources Commission, and as the secretary of the Beloit Public Library Foundation. For many years Deale continued to maintain an office on campus and met with other retired faculty, known as the "Buffaloes."