Adam Hochschild

About Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books and other magazines, and is the author of seven books. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was his recent To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN USA Literary Award.

Reporting and writing historical narrative: Author Adam Hochschild on accessible prose + scene/setting + character + plot

By Story Craft June 29, 2014

Several years ago, Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of King Leopold’s Ghost and other nonfiction narratives, told a Vanderbilt University audience that academic writing doesn’t have to be boring. Scholars of history and science — theoretically any discipline — can use basic storytelling techniques … Read more

"Why’s this so good?" No. 61: John McPhee and the archdruid

By Why's This So Good? October 2, 2012

The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s – by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and others – made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction, and certainly enlarged our idea of what the genre could do. The best of it may endure, but, 50 or 100 years from now, will people still be enthralled by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of italics and exclamation marks? More lasting, I think, as a grand pointillist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the work of John McPhee. Read more