Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild is an American journalist and historian whose career has moved between reporting, magazine editing, teaching, and narrative history. After reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle, he helped found Mother Jones and worked there as an editor and writer. He has also taught writing at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

His nonfiction often follows the workings of power alongside the people who challenge it. He builds history through sharply drawn participants and revealing episodes, joining a reporter’s attention to evidence with a storyteller’s sense of movement. Colonial exploitation, slavery, war, repression, and organized dissent recur across his work.

King Leopold’s Ghost traces Belgium’s King Leopold II’s brutal private rule in the Congo and the international campaign that exposed it. The book won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. Hochschild later examined British abolitionism in Bury the Chains, First World War dissent in To End All Wars, the Spanish Civil War in Spain in Our Hearts, and threats to American democracy after the First World War in American Midnight.

Start with King Leopold’s Ghost. It introduces Hochschild’s characteristic method through figures including shipping clerk turned campaigner E. D. Morel, investigator Roger Casement, and early whistleblower George Washington Williams. The result connects colonial violence with the difficult work of making distant abuses visible.