Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild (born 1942) is an American author and journalist.

Biography

Hochschild was born in New York City and graduated from Harvard in 1963 with a BA in History and Literature. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would eventually write in his book Finding the Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the left-wing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was one of the co-founders of Mother Jones .

Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son (1986), in which he described the difficult relationship he had with his father. His later books include The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990; new edition, 2007), The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994; new edition, 2003), Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (1997), which collects his personal essays and reportage, and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998; new edition, 2006), a history of the conquest and colonization of the Congo by Belgium's King Léopold II. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, published in 2005, is about the antislavery movement in the British Empire. His latest book, concentrating on the opposition to the First World War, is To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (2011)

Hochschild has also written for the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the Nation. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Hochschild's books have been translated into twelve languages.

A frequent lecturer at Harvard's annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference and similar venues, Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Hochschild was a contributing scholar in the award-winning, PBS-broadcast documentary Prince Among Slaves (2007), produced by Unity Productions Foundation.

Awards

• King Leopold's Ghost won the Duff Cooper Prize in Britain, the Mark Lynton History Prize in the United States, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
• Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award.
• Finding the Trapdoor won a prize for the year's best book of essays [1] from PEN American Center.
• Both King Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains have won the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards.
• Bury the Chains won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and the PEN USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction.
• Hochschild is the first person to have twice won Canada's Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international affairs published in English.
• In 2005, he was the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Non-Fiction for the full body of his work.
• In 2009, the American Historical Association awarded Hochschild its Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Prize.
• Hochschild has received honorary degrees from Curry College in Massachusetts and the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

External links

• Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air talks to Hochschild about To End All Wars
• Interview about the craft of writing with the Columbia Journal
• C-SPAN recording of a speech to the National Council on Public History
• Video conversation with Hochschild about King Leopold's Ghost

From his books:

• An excerpt from Bury the Chains
• New edition afterword from King Leopold’s Ghost

Articles:

• reporting from eastern Congo, New York Review of Books, August 2009
• from Mother Jones
• on narrative writing, starting on p. 45
• on writing history

Author Bio:

• Hochschild's home page at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley
• Who's Who in America, 62nd Edition (2008)
• Publisher's website

Reviews of Hochschild's books:

• Half the Way Home [2], [3]

• The Unquiet Ghost [4], [5],[6], [7]

• King Leopold's Ghost [8], [9], [10]

• Bury the Chains [11], [12], [13]

• To End all Wars [14] [15] [16]