Adam Hochschild | |
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| Born | (1942-10-05)October 5, 1942 (age 83) New York City, U.S. |
| Education | Harvard University (BA) |
| Occupations | Writer, journalist |
| Spouse | Arlie Russell Hochschild |
| Children | 2 |
| Parent(s) | Harold K. Hochschild Mary Marquand Hochschild |
| Family | Berthold Hochschild (grandfather) Allan Marquand (grandfather) Henry Gurdon Marquand (great-grandfather) |
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Adam Hochschild (/ˈhoʊkʃɪld/HOHK-shild; born October 5, 1942) is an American author, journalist, historian[1] and lecturer. His best-known works includeKing Leopold's Ghost (1998),To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (2011),Bury the Chains (2005),The Mirror at Midnight (1990),The Unquiet Ghost (1994), andSpain in Our Hearts (2016).
Adam Hochschild was born inNew York City. His father,Harold Hochschild, was of German Jewish descent; his mother, Mary Marquand Hochschild, was of English and Scottish descent and the daughter of art historianAllan Marquand, and an uncle by marriage, Boris Sergievsky, was a World War I fighter pilot in the Imperial Russian Air Force. His German-born paternal grandfatherBerthold Hochschild co-founded the mining firmAmerican Metal Company.[2]
Hochschild graduated fromHarvard in 1963 with a BA in History and Literature.[3] As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as acivil rights worker in Mississippi during 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would eventually write in his booksHalf the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son andFinding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels. He later was part of the movement against theVietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the left-wingRamparts magazine. In 1976, he was a co-founder ofMother Jones.[4] Much of his writing has been about issues of human rights and social justice.
A longtime lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, Hochschild has also been a Fulbright Lecturer in India, Regents' Lecturer at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz and Writer-in-Residence at the Department of History,University of Massachusetts, Amherst.[5] He is married to sociologistArlie Russell Hochschild and lives inBerkeley, California.[6]
As of 1993, he was a member of theDemocratic Socialists of America.[7]
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. InThe New York Times, criticMichiko Kakutani called the book "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love."[8]
InThe Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey (1990; new edition, 2007) he examines the tensions of modern South Africa through the prism of the nineteenth-centuryBattle of Blood River, which determined whether theBoers or theZulus 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.
InThe Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin[9] (1994; new edition, 2003), Hochschild chronicles the six months he spent in Russia, traveling to Siberia and the Arctic, interviewinggulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, former members of the secret police and countless others aboutJoseph Stalin's reign of terror in the country, during which hundreds of thousands of people died.
Hochschild'sFinding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels[10][11][12] (1997) collects his personal essays and shorter pieces of reportage, as does a more recent collection,Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays (2018)[13]
HisKing Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998; new edition, 2006) is a history of the conquest of theCongo byKing Léopold II ofBelgium, and of the atrocities that were committed under Leopold's private rule of the colony, events that led to 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 toThe Guardian' review at the time of the book's first edition, 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."[14]
Hochschild'sBury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (2005) is about theantislavery 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.[15]
In 2011, Hochschild publishedTo End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, which considers theFirst 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 2016Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 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 ofRose Pastor Stokes, was published in 2020, and his latest,American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, in 2022. Hochschild's books have been translated into seventeen languages.
Hochschild has also written for theNew Yorker,Harper's Magazine,The Atlantic,Granta, theTimes Literary Supplement, theNew York Review of Books, theNew York Times Magazine, andThe Nation and other publications. He was also a commentator onNational Public Radio'sAll Things Considered.
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