Edward Ball

Who is Edward Ball?

Edward Ball is an American writer, a university instructor and the author of five books of non-fiction, including Slaves in the Family and The Inventor and the Tycoon.

The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures tells the story of the partnership, during the 1870s, between California railroad magnate Leland Stanford and solitary photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who killed a man, and then went on to invent motion pictures.

Slaves in the Family is a book about the author'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.

Ball's other books include a biography of a transsexual and scandal figure from the 1960s, Dawn Langley Simmons, and a history of a rich black family in the Jim Crow South, the Harlestons of South Carolina.