Edward Ball is an American writer and the author of six books of non-fiction, including Slaves in the Family, The Inventor and the Tycoon, and Life of a Klansman.
Ball moved to New York City, where he worked as a freelance journalist, writing about film, art, architecture, and books. He wrote often for the weekly 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. The Ball family story led to his first book, Slaves in the Family, a bestseller that won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Ball set aside journalism and continued to write nonfiction books.
Selected works
The first of these is about Edward Ball'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. Set during the 1870s,The Inventor and the Tycoon tells the story of the partnership between California railroad magnate Leland Stanford and landscape photographerEadweard Muybridge, who documented Yosemite Valley, committed a murder, and went on to create the first moving pictures, leading to the invention of cinema. Life of a Klansman, forthcoming in spring 2020 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, tells the story of a foot soldier in the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana during Reconstruction, after the Civil War, examining the life of one man who involves himself in violent white supremacy. Ball's other books include a biography of Dawn Langley Simmons, a trans woman who aroused bigotry and fascination during the 1960s, and a history of a prosperous black family in the Jim Crow South, the Harlestons of South Carolina.
Slaves in the Family — An investigation of 170 years of slave ownership by the author's family in South Carolina, and the stories of ten African American families whom the author's ancestors enslaved.
Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love — The life of English writer Gordon Hall, who, during the 1960s, became an early gender-reassignment patient, reinvented himself as a rich white woman named Dawn Langley Simmons, married an African-American delivery man, and produced a mixed-race daughter, whom she claimed was her biological child.
The Genetic Strand: Exploring a Family History Through DNA — When the author finds a 150-year-old collection of children's hair from the 1800s, he turns to DNA science as an investigative tool of family history, testing the locks of hair to reveal their genetic secrets.
The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures — The lives of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge and railroad capitalist Leland Stanford, who came together to invent the technology of motion pictures, although not before Muybridge murdered a man who had seduced his wife.
