Edward ball author books
Edward Ball
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Edward Ball is a nonfiction writer who has published five books of history and biography, including Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), an account of his family’s 170-year history as slaveholders in South Carolina. Ball is interested in the place of history and memory in the lives of ordinary people. Since 2010, he has taught nonfiction writing, part-time, at Yale University.
At the Radcliffe Institute, Ball is investigating the life of a fighter in the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana, a member of Ball’s own family, examining the role of a participant in the race terror that spread through the South after the end of the Civil War, during Reconstruction. The book he is writing is outwardly the biography of a plain Southerner, a person neither distinguished nor well documented, while it is also an attempt to explore the roots of white supremacy.
Winner of a National Book Award for Slaves in the Family, Ball has written two books that reached the New York Times Best Sellers list. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and a grant from the Public Scholar Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures (Doubleday, 2013)—a story of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1880s California—is in development as a television miniseries.
Books by Edward Ball
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Edward Ball (American author)
American history writer and journalist (born 1958)
Edward Ball | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1958 (age 66–67) Savannah, Georgia, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author, journalist |
| Alma mater | Brown University |
| Years active | Since 1987 |
| edwardball.com | |
Edward Ball (born 1958) is an American author who has written multiple works on topics such as history and biography. He is best known for works that explore the complex past of his family, whose members were major rice planters and slaveholders in South Carolina for nearly 300 years. One of his more well known works is based around an African-American family, descended from one member of this family and an enslaved woman, whose members became successful artists and musicians in the Jazz Age.
The Ball Family Slaveholder Index (BFSI) reports that between 1698 and 1865, six generations of the Ball family "owned more than twenty rice plantations in Lowcountry South Carolina and enslaved nearly 4,000 Africans and African Americans." Edward Ball, who completed his MA in 1984, worked as a freelance journalist before he began researching and writing about his family's history of slaveholding.
His books include Slaves in the Family (1998), which won a National Book Award. In Slaves in the Family, he described his great-great grandfather, Isaac Ball (1785-1825), a fifth generation member of the Ball family of slaveholders, who inherited the Comingtee plantation, near Charleston and owned 571 enslaved people.
He was also recognized for his Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy (2020). In the Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, he wrote about his maternal great-great-grandfather, Constant Lecorgne (1832 -n.d. ). At one time, he was officially classified as "colored," which denoted that he was a mulatto or a mixed race person at the time. Having European ancestors, he changed his name and passed a
.