Adam Hochschild named Gold Medal winner for best nonfiction in the California Book Awards

The Commonwealth Club has announced the winners of the 92nd annual California Book Awards. Among them is continuing lecturer Adam Hochschild, who was named Gold Medal winner for best nonfiction for “American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.”

It marks Hochschild’s third win of the prestigious prize.

His book is a reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between American entry into World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and labor rights.

The award is the latest in a string of accolades the book has received, including starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly and Booklist. It has also been named to best books of the year lists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, New York Post and Fast Company and has received front-page coverage in both The New York Times Book Review and its British equivalent, The Times Literary Supplement.

Listen to Hochschild discuss the book at a Commonwealth Club event on Oct. 13 here.

“I feel grateful to have received this award,” Hochschild said. “I couldn’t have gotten to this point in my writing life without the help of two of my favorite parts of the Berkeley campus. Teaching narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism for 30 years now has helped me sharpen my own skills as a writer, because in writing, as in anything else, you have to practice what you preach. And at the J-School I’m less than five minutes’ walk from one of the great research libraries of the world and its amazing panoply of books, periodicals, and archival material. I could not have written most of my books without it.”

In “American Midnight,” Hochschild evokes the years from 1917 to 1921, a strangely forgotten time when the nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison solely for opinions they voiced — in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some 75 newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.

This was America during and after World War I: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons — a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law later flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period Hochschild evokes through a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator — who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.

Adam Hochschild teaching narrative writing.

Hochschild is the author of 11 books. “King Leopold’s Ghost” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was “To End All Wars.” His “Bury the Chains” was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN USA Literary Award. He taught his first class in North Gate Hall in 1992 and has returned to teach in most years since then. His wife, Professor Emerita Arlie Russell Hochschild, spent almost her entire academic career in Berkeley’s Sociology Department.

Since 1931, the California Book Awards have honored the exceptional literary merit of California writers and publishers. Each year a select jury considers hundreds of books from around the state in search of the very best in literary achievement.

A virtual awards ceremony to recognize the winners will be held on June 5.