Adam Hochschild


Adam Hochschild is an American author, journalist, historian and lecturer. His best-known works include King Leopold's Ghost, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, Bury the Chains, The Mirror at Midnight, The Unquiet Ghost, and Spain in Our Hearts.

Biography

Hochschild was born in New York City. His father, Harold Hochschild, was of German Jewish descent; his mother, Mary Marquand Hochschild, was a Protestant, and an uncle by marriage, Boris Sergievsky, was a World War I fighter pilot in the Imperial Russian Air Force.
Adam 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 during 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would eventually write in his books Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels. 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. Much of his writing has been about issues of human rights and social justice.
A longtime lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Hochschild has also been a Fulbright Lecturer in India, Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Writer-in-Residence at the Department of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is married to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Works

Books

Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, in which he described the difficult relationship he had with his father. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called the book "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love."
In The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey he examines the tensions of modern South Africa through the prism of the nineteenth-century Battle of Blood River, which determined whether the Boers or the Zulus would control that part of the world, as well as looking at the contentious commemoration of the event by rival groups 150 years later, at the height of the apartheid era.
In The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Hochschild chronicles the six months he spent in Russia, traveling to Siberia and the Arctic, interviewing gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, former members of the secret police and countless others about Joseph Stalin's reign of terror in the country, during which millions of people died.
Hochschild's Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels collects his personal essays and shorter pieces of reportage, as does a more recent collection, Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays.
His King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is a history of the conquest of the Congo by King Léopold II of Belgium, and of the atrocities that were committed under Leopold's private rule of the colony, events that sparked the twentieth century's first great international human rights campaign. The book reignited interest and inquiry into Leopold's colonial regime in the Congo, but was met by some hostility in Belgium. According to a contemporary review in The Guardian, the book "brought howls of rage from Belgium's ageing colonials and some professional historians even as it has climbed the country's best-seller lists."
Hochschild's ' is about the antislavery movement in Britain. The story of how abolitionists organized to change the opinions of and bring greater awareness to the British public about slavery has attracted attention from contemporary climate change activists, who see an analogy to their own work.
In 2011 Hochschild published To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, which looks at the era of the First World War in terms of the struggle between those who felt the war was a noble crusade and those who felt it was not worth the sacrifice of millions of lives. His 2016 ' follows a dozen characters through that conflict, among them volunteer soldiers and medical workers, journalists who covered the war, and a little-known American oilman who sold Francisco Franco most of the fuel for his military. Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, published in 2020, is his latest book. Hochschild's books have been translated into fourteen languages.

Journalism

Hochschild has also written for the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and The Nation and other publications. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Statement about writing

In 2012, Hochschild was given an award for his work by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He and the other writers receiving awards at the Academy's annual ceremony were asked to write short statements about their work, to be part of an exhibit of their books and manuscripts. His statement is as follows:

Books

Awards