About Hampton
Hampton Sides on Russia’s Wrangel Island with 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth tusk. Photo by Sergey Gorshkov.
HAMPTON SIDES is best-known for his gripping, deeply researched non-fiction works that focus on classic episodes from American history, stories often set in war or depicting epic adventures of survival, exploration, or first contact between disparate worlds. He’s the author of the acclaimed bestselling narrative histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound On His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, On Desperate Ground, and, most recently, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.
The New York Times named The Wide Wide Sea one of 2024’s Ten Best Books of the Year and Barack Obama featured it on his coveted Summer Reading List. Writing in The Observer, Stephen Fry called The Wide Wide Sea “extraordinarily compulsive and fascinating on every page.” The book has been optioned for the screen.
Photo by Sergio Salvador
Hampton has been a contributor to Outside, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. His journalistic work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing.
A native of Memphis and a Yale graduate, Hampton is a board member of the Society of American Historians and the Author’s Guild, and he was a Miller Distinguished Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Aspen Institute, the Ucross Foundation, and Stanford University. He has an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Colorado College.
Hampton lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
