Edward Ball (American author)

Edward Ball (born October 8, 1959) is an American writer and the author of six books of non-fiction, including Slaves in the Family (1998), The Inventor and the Tycoon (2013), and Life of a Klansman (forthcoming 2020).

Edward Ball
Born1959 (age 60–61)
Savannah, Georgia, United States
OccupationWriter
Alma materBrown University
SubjectHistory
Website
edwardball.com

The first of these is about Edward Ball's family, slaveowners in South Carolina for 170 years. It recounts the author's search for and meetings with African Americans whose ancestors his family once enslaved.[1] The book won the National Book Award, became a New York Times bestseller,[2] was featured on Oprah, and was translated into several languages.[3][4]

Set during the 1870s,The Inventor and the Tycoon tells the story of the partnership between California railroad magnate Leland Stanford and landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who documented Yosemite Valley, committed a murder, and went on to create the first moving pictures, leading to the invention of cinema.

Life of a Klansman, forthcoming in spring 2020 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, tells the story of a foot soldier in the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana during Reconstruction, after the Civil War, examining the life of one man who involves himself in violent white supremacy.

Ball's other books include a biography of Dawn Langley Simmons, a trans woman who aroused bigotry and fascination during the 1960s, and a history of a prosperous black family in the Jim Crow South, the Harlestons of South Carolina.

Education

He was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1959 and grew up in the South. He attended Brown University, graduating in 1982.

Career

Ball moved to New York City, where he worked as a freelance journalist, writing about film, art, architecture, and books. He wrote often for the weekly Village Voice.[5]

In the 1990s, he began to research his father's family, which had enslaved some 4000 people on twenty-five rice plantations in South Carolina. The Ball family story led to his first book, Slaves in the Family, a bestseller that won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.[6] Ball set aside journalism and continued to write nonfiction books.

Selected works
  • Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) — An investigation of 170 years of slave ownership by the author's family in South Carolina, and the stories of ten African American families whom the author's ancestors enslaved.
  • 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 in the Reconstruction South, who rose from the ashes of Jim Crow segregation 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 an early gender-reassignment patient, reinvented himself as a rich white woman named Dawn Langley Simmons, married an African-American delivery man, 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) — When the author finds a 150-year-old collection of children's hair from the 1800s, he turns to DNA science as an investigative tool of family history, testing the locks of hair to reveal their genetic secrets.[7][8]
  • 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.

References
  1. Top 5 Reasons to See ‘12 Years A Slave’ - EcoSalon | Conscious Culture and Fashion : EcoSalon | Conscious Culture and Fashion
  2. First Chapters: Nonfiction Index - The New York Times
  3. Faust, Drew Gilpin (1 March 1998). Skeletons in the Family Closet, The New York Times
  4. (19 November 1998). National Book Awards Given, Lawrence Journal-World
  5. Books & Authors - The Village Voice - 98.02.26
  6. "National Book Awards – 1998". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-24.
    (With acceptance speech by Ball.)
  7. Beason, Tyrone (30 November 2007). DNA tells family story in "Genetic Strand", Seattle Times
  8. (6 December 2007). Author, Scientist Assist in Tracing Lineage, NPR
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.