Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild (pronunciation: ”Hoch” as in ”spoke”; ”schild” as in ”build”) is the author of eight books; the latest, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, appeared in 2016. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award, the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, collects some of the articles he has done in several decades of writing for various newspapers and magazines. Earlier in his career, he was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and an editor and writer at Mother Jones magazine. His articles have also been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2009 he received the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Historical Association and in 2014 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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You can watch video interviews of Adam Hochschild by Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes,” and by Alison Stewart of PBS, or hear him interviewed by Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” about Spain in Our Hearts and about To End All Wars. The text of a print interview with him about his body of work appears here. Subjects covered in magazine articles by him include reporting from Eastern Congo, the state of American prisons, and looking back at the First World War.

TEACHING SCHEDULE:

PUBLICATIONS & OTHER WORK

• Spain in Our Hearts: Americans and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
  "With all due respect to Orwell, 'Spain in Our Hearts' should supplant 'Homage to Catalonia' as the best introduction to the conflict written in English." --New Republic.

• King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
  "Hochschild's book is a rare thing in possessing both scholarly worth and the virtues of a novel. This is an extraordinary book." --Boston Sunday Globe.

• Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son
  "An extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times.

• The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey
  "Adam Hochschild is the most astute yet disarming of travelers. Through the prism of a strangely special relationship with South Africa, his is far more than an outsider's perception of the drama of our country." --Nadine Gordimer.

• The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
  "The characters and the dramatic situations Mr. Hochschild encounters are nothing short of magnificent." --New York Times Book Review.

• Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels
  "An enthralling excursion around the world and into the heart." --Publishers Weekly.

• Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
  "A thrilling, substantive . . . work of narrative history. In its own fashion, it furthers the abolitionists' crucial work of lifting our moral blindness." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR's 'Fresh Air.'

MEDIA PLATFORMS

Narrative Writing