His father was an Episcopal priest from an old Southern family in Charleston, and his mother was a bookkeeper raised in New Orleans.

Ball left the South for almost the first time to attend Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, from which he graduated in 1982. He settled in New York in 1984 and became a freelance journalist, writing on film, art and architecture. Ball wrote for Hearst and Hachette publications, The Village Voice, and various art magazines, and in 1990, became a columnist for The Village Voice.

In 1994, Ball approached National Public Radio to do a radio story about his father's family and its history of slave ownership in South Carolina. He wrote and narrated "The Other History," a 35-minute radio documentary about the legacy of the plantations, and thousands of slaves, once controlled by the Ball family. In fall 1994, under contract with the publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Ball stopped working as a journalist, moved from New York to Charleston, and began work on his first book, Slaves in the Family, about his search for descendants of his ancestors' slaves. Published in 1998, Slaves in the Family was a New York Times bestseller, won the National Book Award for non-fiction, and was acquired for film production by Turner Network Television.

Ball's second book, entitled The Sweet Hell Inside, is the nonfiction saga of a light-skinned black family to whom he is related. The Sweet Hell Inside tells the epic story of the Harlestons of South Carolina, a family of "mulattoes" who rose from the ashes of the Civil War to build a cultural dynasty that peaked between the World Wars and extends into the present. The Sweet Hell Inside is forthcoming from William Morrow & Co. in November 2001.

Journalism, Entertainers, Authors, Celebrity