Edward Ball (born 1958) is an American author who has written multiple works on topics such as history and biography.

He is best known for works that explore the complex past of his family, whose members were major rice planters and slaveholders in South Carolina for nearly 300 years.

"[1] Edward Ball, who completed his MA in 1984, worked as a freelance journalist before he began researching and writing about his family's history of slaveholding.

In the Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, he wrote about his maternal great-great-grandfather, Constant Lecorgne (1832 -n.d. ).

Ball grew up in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, as his family moved following his father's church assignments.

[5] During the 1980s, Ball worked as a freelance journalist in New York City, writing about art, books, and film for The Village Voice and Condé Nast, Hearst, and Hachette magazines.

"[1][10][Notes 1] Edward Ball conducted research that went far beyond this work, as he traced numerous slaves named in records, including some who appeared in photographs held by the family.

Ball's account, "Priscilla's homecoming", was published by The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

[3] In this book, Ball also explored the life of Louis Charles Roudanez, a prominent homme de couleur libre, or free man of color, a contemporary in New Orleans of the Lecorgne family.

Roudanez became educated, and a medical doctor, "trained in France and at Dartmouth, who published The New Orleans Tribune, a daily newspaper for the Black community.

"[3] According to the 2020 Times review of Life of a Klansman, "The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance.

In Ball’s retelling of his family saga, the sins and stains of the past are still very much with us, not something we can dismiss by blaming them on misguided ancestors who died long ago.

The result is brave, revealing and intimate, an exploration of how one family’s morally complicated past echoes down to the present.