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Edward Ball (American author)

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Edward Ball
Born1958 (age 65–66)
Savannah, Georgia, U.S.
OccupationAuthor, journalist
Alma materBrown University
Years activeSince 1987
Website
edwardball.com

Edward Ball is an American author with six books of history and biography. Ball is best known for books that explore race through family stories, including Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy (2020) and Slaves in the Family (1998).[1]

Early years

Edward Ball was born in 1958 in Savannah, Georgia to a religious, southern family. He is a son of Episcopal priest Theodore Ball and Janet Rowley Ball, a bookkeeper. Ball grew up in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, as his family moved following his father's church assignments. Edward Ball received a B.A. from Brown University in 1982 and an M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1984.[2]

Selected works

  • Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) — An investigation of 175 years of slave ownership by the author's family in South Carolina.
  • The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the South (Morrow, 2001) — The history of the Harlestons, a prosperous black family, progeny of a white Southern slaveholder and his enslaved black cook, who rose from the ashes of the Civil War to create a dynasty in art and music during the Jazz Age.
  • Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love (Simon & Schuster, 2004) — The life of English writer Gordon Hall, who, during the 1960s, became one of the first sex-reassignment patients, reinvented as Dawn Langley Simmons, a rich white woman, who married a black fisherman and produced a mixed-race daughter, whom she claimed was her biological child.
  • The Genetic Strand: Exploring a Family History Through DNA (Simon & Schuster, 2007) — The author finds a 150-year-old collection of children's hair kept by his family during the 1800s, and turns to DNA science as a tool of family history, testing the locks of hair to reveal their genetic secrets.[3][4]
  • The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures (Doubleday, 2013) — The lives of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge and railroad capitalist Leland Stanford, who came together to invent the technology of motion pictures, although not before Muybridge murdered a man who had seduced his wife.
  • Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) –– The story of a white supremacist and marauder in the first Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana, during Reconstruction—the author's great-grandfather, in New Orleans.[5]The Wall Street Journal[6]
File:Edward Ball, New Orleans, 2016 (photo, Claire Bangser).jpg
Edward Ball in New Orleans next to a monument to the White League, a supremacist militia active during Reconstruction (photo, Claire Bangser, 2016)

Other work

Edward Ball taught at Yale University between 2010 and 2015. He has also taught at the State University of New York. During the 1980s, Ball worked as a freelance journalist in New York City, writing about art, books, and film for The Village Voice and Condé Nast, Hearst, and Hachette magazines. He wrote a column about architecture and design for The Village Voice[7]

Recognition

Awards

Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University 2016–17[8]

Fellow, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library, 2015–16[9]

Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, Public Scholar Grant, 2015[10]

Southern Book Award, 1999

National Book Award, Nonfiction, 1998

References

  1. ^ "A Family With a Past," profile of Edward Ball, Radcliffe magazine (Summer 2017). Article
  2. ^ About Edward Ball, edwardball.com
  3. ^ Beason, Tyrone (30 November 2007). DNA tells family story in "Genetic Strand", Seattle Times
  4. ^ (6 December 2007). Author, Scientist Assist in Tracing Lineage, NPR
  5. ^ Walter Isaacson, "Life of a Klansman Tells Ugly Truths About America, Past and Present," The New York Times, August 4, 2020.
  6. ^ W. Ralph Eubanks, review of Life of a Klansman, The Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2020.
  7. ^ Selected journalism, edwardball.com: "Articles"
  8. ^ Radcliffe fellows, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, website: 2016–17 Radcliffe fellows
  9. ^ Past fellows, Cullman Center website, New York Public Library: 2015–16 Cullman fellows
  10. ^ “An Introduction to NEH’s Public Scholars Program,” National Endowment for the Humanities blog (April 14, 2020): NEH Public Scholars
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