Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Memphis, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—PEN-USA for Nonfiction
• Currently—Santa Fe, New Mexico
Hampton Sides is an American historian and journalist. He is the author of Hellhound on His Trail, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, and other bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction.
Sides is editor-at-large for Outside magazine and has written for such periodicals as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Men's Journal, and the Washington Post. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing.
Ghost Soldiers (2001), a World War II narrative about the rescue of Bataan Death March survivors, has sold slightly over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. Esquire called the book "the greatest World War II story never told." The book was the subject of documentaries on PBS and The History Channel, and was the basis for the 2005 Miramax film, The Great Raid. Ghost Soldiers won the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction. The book's success led Sides to create The Ghost Soldiers Endowment Fund, a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving the memory of the sacrifices made by Bataan and Corregidor veterans by funding relevant archives, museums, and memorials.
Sides' Blood and Thunder (2006) focuses on the life and times of controversial frontiersman Kit Carson, and his role in the conquest of the American West. A critic for the Los Angeles Times described Blood and Thunder as "stunning, haunting, and lyrical," while the Washington Post called it "riveting, monumental...authoritative and masterfully told." Blood and Thunder was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time magazine, and was the subject of a major documentary on the PBS program American Experience.
Hellhound on His Trail (2010) is about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history to capture James Earl Ray, who pled guilty in 1969 and served the rest of his life in prison. Sides, who is a native of Memphis, is the first historian to make use of a new digital archive in Memphis, called the B. Venson Hughes Collection, which contains more than 20,000 documents and photos, many of them rare or never before published. Sides’ research forms much of the basis for PBS’s documentary "Roads to Memphis" which originally aired May 3, 2010, on the award-winning program, American Experience.
Sides has appeared as a guest on such national broadcasts as American Experience, the Today Show, Book TV, History Channel, NPR's Fresh Air, CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Colbert Report, Imus in the Morning, and NPR's All Things Considered.
A native of Memphis with a BA in history from Yale, Sides lives in Santa Fe with his wife Anne Goodwin Sides, a journalist and former NPR editor. They have three sons. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)