Edward Ball (American author)
| Edward Ball | |
|---|---|
Ball in 2007
|
|
| Born |
October 8, 1959 Savannah, Georgia, United States |
| Occupation | History writer, author |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1978-present |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Subject | History |
| Notable works | Slaves in the Family |
| Notable awards | National Book Award |
Edward Ball (born October 8, 1959) is an American writer, a university instructor and the author of five books of non-fiction, including Slaves in the Family (1998) and The Inventor and the Tycoon (2013).
The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures (Doubleday) tells the story of the partnership, during the 1870s, between California railroad magnate Leland Stanford and solitary photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who killed a man, and then went on to invent motion pictures.
Slaves in the Family is a book about the author'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. The book won the National Book Award, became a New York Times bestseller, was featured on Oprah, and was translated into several languages.
Ball's other books include a biography of a transsexual and scandal figure from the 1960s, Dawn Langley Simmons, and a history of a rich black family in the Jim Crow South, the Harlestons of South Carolina.
He was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1959 and grew up in the South. He attended Brown University, graduating in 1982.
After graduation, Ball moved to New York City, where he worked as a freelance art critic, writing about film, art, architecture, and books. For several years, he worked as a columnist for the weekly newspaper The Village Voice.
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, between the years 1698 and 1865. The family legacy, documented in several archives, led to his first book, Slaves in the Family, a bestseller that won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He lived in Charleston, South Carolina at the time.
...
Wikipedia