Edward Ball (American author)

Edward Ball (born 1958) is an American writer of nonfiction best known for his book Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), which tells the story of his family’s 200-year history as slave-owners in South Carolina and about the author's search for and meetings with descendants of his family's slaves. Slaves in the Family won the National Book Award, was a New York Times bestseller, was featured on Oprah!, and was translated into several languages.

Life and work

Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1958, and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He graduated from St. Martin's School, in New Orleans, and from Brown University, in 1982, with a B.A. in Semiotics. He received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1984, and afterwards moved to New York City. He began writing art criticism for glossy magazines -- including Premiere, Elle, New York, and Connoisseur. After 1988 he wrote for The Village Voice, a New York weekly with a circulation of 450,000, developing a column about architecture.

In 1994, he began to investigate his family inheritance as slave owners in South Carolina, a hunt that resulted in the half-hour National Public Radio documentary, "The Other History." He looked further into his family's story, documented in many archives, and, after three years, he published his first book, Slaves in the Family, about his family's plantations and his search for and meetings with for black Americans who ancestors his family had once enslaved. Slaves in the Family was a New York Times bestseller, won the National Book Award for nonfiction, was optioned for a TV miniseries (Turner/Time-Warner), was featured on Oprah!, and was published in translation in Spanish, Dutch, German, and Finnish. Spain.

Between 1990 and 1994, Edward Ball was an art & film critic for The Village Voice, New York magazine,Condé Nast, Hearst, and Hachette magazines, the New York Times, New York magazine, The Journal of Art (Rizzoli Publications), 7 Days, and other journals.

mmoxed,[6] collaborated with One Ring Zero on the EP Rick Moody and One Ring Zero in 2004, and also contributed lyrics to One Ring Zero's albums As Smart As We Are and Memorandum.[7] In 2006, an essay by Moody was included in Sufjan Stevens's box-set Songs for Christmas. When asked by the New York Times Book Review what he thought was the best book of American fiction from 1975 to 2000, Moody chose Grace Paley's The Collected Stories.[8] In 2001, Rick Moody co-founded the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award with Ethan Hawke, Hannah McFarland, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.[9] Moody has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase and Bennington College. He lives in Brooklyn and Fishers Island. [edit]Critique

Books:

BOOKS:

[1998] Slaves in the Family History - An investigation of 175 years of slave ownership by my family in South Carolina, and the story of my search for and meetings with descendants of people whom we once enslaved (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998; U.K.: Penguin, 1999). Winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction; New York Times bestseller; featured on Oprah!; optioned for a TV miniseries (Turner/Time-Warner). Published in translation in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and Spain. [2001] The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the South History – The story of a rich black family in the South, the Harlestons, progeny of a white Southern gentleman and an enslaved black cook, who rose from the ashes of the Civil War to create a dynasty in art and music during the Jazz Age (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2001; Harper Perennial, 2002). [2004] Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love Biography – of English writer Gordon Hall, who – during the 1960s, living in the American South – became a male-to-female transsexual, emerging as Dawn Langely Hall, who married a black fisherman and produced a mixed-race daughter whom she claimed was her biological child, creating outrage in several acts (Simon & Schuster, 2004; U.K.: Weidenfeld). [2007] The Genetic Strand: Exploring a Family History Through DNA Science – An exploration of the use of DNA science as an instrument of family history (Simon & Schuster) [forthcoming] The Octopus and the Inventor: Eadweard Muybridge, the Killer Who Created the Movies Biography - The life of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who – employed by railroad baron Leland Stanford – invented the technology of motion pictures after murdering a man who had seduced his wife (Doubleday/Random House.)

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