42 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JANUARY 27, 2020
Author Profile
more a “joint biography.” The second subject is Stokes’s hus-
band, Graham Stokes. An idealistic upper-class reformer,
Graham married Rose Pastor in 1905. They were, to put it
mildly, from different sides of the tracks. She was a Jewish
immigrant who began working in cigar factories at age 11. He
was a WASP, and a member of one of the country’s wealthiest
families. The press went wild over the union, and the couple
used their celebrity to support radical
causes until they divorced after WWI,
which he supported and she opposed.
Hochschild was drawn to Stokes and
her husband in part because of their
fairy tale romance. “It was fascinating to
write the story of a marriage between
people from worlds so different you
wouldn’t believe it in a novel,” he says.
The couple also ran with quite the
crowd; in Hochschild’s estimation, they
entertained some of the most notable
people of their era. “If you think about
the most interesting people alive in the
United States in the first 15 years of the
20th century, almost every single one of
them was a friend or house guest or
acquaintance: [Socialist Party of
America leader] Eugene V. Debs,
[muckraking journalist] Lincoln
Steffens, [anarchist activist] Emma
Goldman, [radical labor organizers] Bill
Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn...
The list goes on and on. Rose and
Graham were at the center of all this.”
Rebel Cinderella shares with Hochschild’s previous books a
sympathetic view of activists proposing radical social change.
“I can’t think of anything more interesting to write about than
people struggling to make a better world,” Hochschild says.
“There’s something dramatic and emotionally interesting when
someone is moved or shocked by something they see, and it
takes them out of themselves.”
Hochschild’s voice rings with conviction as he describes his
mission. He has an activist background himself. His early years as
a journalist were spent at Ramparts magazine, and he also cofounded
Mother Jones in the 1970s. He still writes the occasional article or
opinion piece; he and actor/director Ben Affleck cowrote an op-ed
in the Los Angeles Times last year urging continued foreign aid to
the Republic of Congo. The two met about 10 years ago, when
Affleck was launching a foundation to support economic and social
development in Congo, and he has held an option on the film
rights to King Leopold’s Ghost for some time.
“I hope it’s going to be a movie,” Hochschild says. “But
having the rights and actually having it reach the screen are two
different things. I’m delighted Ben Affleck is involved, because
I respect his commitment to the Congo. He has made that long-suffering country the focus of his philanthropy for the last dozen
years and has spent a lot more time there than I have.”
King Leopold’s Ghost marked a turning point for Hochschild.
For that book—which has, according to HMH, sold more than
two million copies (in print and digital) in North America
alone—he focused on making history feel as immediate as jour-
nalism. “It occurred to me that a fascinating form in which to
do a book would be to find a resonant
episode and then draw portraits of
people connected with it on all sides: as
perpetrators, victims, observers, and
bystanders,” he says. “I realized this was
a really fascinating way to tell a story—
through a collection of characters who
are all connected.”
Publishers didn’t respond, though.
When Hochschild’s agent, Georges
Borchardt, submitted King Leopold’s
Ghost, nine editors passed on it. John
Sterling at Houghton Mifflin was the
exception. Although Sterling left the
house shortly after editing King Leopold,
Hochschild remained; he’s been at HMH
for two decades now, having struck up a
long-standing editorial relationship with
Bruce Nichols, senior v-p of the pub-
lisher’s general interest group. “He has a
special feeling for history,” Hochschild
says of Nichols. “And he always seems to
understand what I’m trying to do.”
Hochschild is currently working on
a book about the First Red Scare, a period stretching from 1917
to 1920, when law enforcement officials led by Attorney
General Alexander Mitchell Palmer arrested thousands of labor
organizers and other activists and deported 249 foreign-born
radicals. Hochschild has, in fact, already published on the
subject; his article “When America Tried to Deport Its
Radicals,” based on his early research for the book, ran in the
Nov. 11, 2019, issue of the New Yorker.
That Hochschild is still active as a journalist is unsurprising,
as he still relies heavily on his skills as a reporter. “When I was
a daily newspaper reporter, out interviewing people, you’d hear
one striking thing and think, ‘That’s my lead! That’s the phrase
I can build my whole story around,’ ” he says. For Rebel Cinderella,
he found all sorts of those phrases in his subjects’ letters. “Those
are the gems you’re always looking for.”
Hochschild’s in that process, of looking for gems, all over
again. “Right now, I’m plowing through informers’ reports [on
activists under surveillance during the First Red Scare],” he says.
“And I’m still looking for the phrase that leaps out to reveal
something about the speaker and his prejudices and about the
people he’s observing.” He pauses. “It feels like the same thing
I did as a 22-year-old reporter.” ■