His father, Harold Hochschild, was of German Jewish descent; his mother, Mary Marquand Hochschild, was of English and Scottish descent and the daughter of pioneering art historian Allan Marquand, and an uncle by marriage, Boris Sergievsky, was a World War I fighter pilot in the Imperial Russian Air Force.

Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would eventually write in his books Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels.

He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the left-wing Ramparts magazine.

In The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani called the book "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love.

In The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin[9] (1994; new edition, 2003), Hochschild chronicles the six months he spent in Russia, traveling to Siberia and the Arctic, interviewing gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, former members of the secret police and countless others about Joseph Stalin's reign of terror in the country, during which hundreds of thousands of people died.

Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, was published in 2020, and his latest, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, in 2022.