Edward Ball

Edward Ball

Edward Ball was born in 1958 and is currently 67 years old. Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Ball attended Brown University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree and the University of Iowa where he received a Master of Arts degree.

Edward Ball is an author that writes biography and history. He is best known for his works which explore the complex past of his family, whose members were major slaveholders and rice planters in South Carolina for almost 300 years. One of Edward’s best known works is based around an African-American family, that descended from a member of his family and one enslaved woman, whose members became successful musicians and artists during the Jazz Age.

During the 1980s, he worked as a freelance journalist in New York City where he wrote about books, art, and film for The Village Voice and Conde Nast, Hachette, and Hearstmagazines.

Isaac Ball, a fifth generation of the Ball family slaveholders, inherited the Comingtee plantation, close to Charleston, and owned 571 enslaved people.

Edward has conducted research that extends far beyond his work, while tracing numerous slaves named in records, including some that appeared in pictures the family held. He recounted the life of one enslaved woman named Priscilla by his Ball ancestor.

Edward has taught at the State University of New York and at Yale University from 2010 and 2015.

Slaves in the Family won a 1998 National Book Award.

The Sweet Hell Inside: A Family History recounts the lives of the Harleston family of South Carolina, they are the progeny of one Southern gentleman and his slave that cast off their own blemished roots and achieved affluence in part because of a surprisingly successful funeral parlor business. The wealth they amassed afforded them the comfort of tailored clothes, chauffeurs, and servants whose skin was darker than theirs was. It also launched the family into a generation of glory as performers, photographers, and painters in the high yellow society of America’s colored upper class.

Their remarkable 100 year long journey spans the final days of Reconstruction, the back alleys of the Jazz Age, the precious art world of the early 1900s, and the civil rights movement’s beginning.

Edward introduces a cast of historical characters that’s rarely been seen before: vain, cultured, rich, black, and imperfect; a family that is made up of eccentrics that defied social convention yet whose advantages still couldn’t protect them from segregation’s locked doors, this plague of early death, and the stigma of kids born outside of marriage.

Enhanced further by the recollections of the family’s archivist, Edwina Harleston Whitlock, whose bloodline the author shares. This book raises the curtain on quite the unique family drama in the pageant of American life and also uncovers a fascinating lost world.

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Edward Ball: F.A.Q