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Jack Bass is author or co-author of six nonfiction books about the American South. His works have focused on Southern politics, race relations, and the role of law in shaping the civil rights era.

A graduate of the University of South Carolina, Bass studied as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Emory University. After 10 years as a newspaper reporter and editor in the Carolinas, he spent two years as a research scholar at Duke University and 18 months at the Institute of Legal History at University of South Carolina.

He taught for 11 years as professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi and currently is professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston. He has written for The Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, Washington Post, The New Republic, and The New York Times. He is married to TV cooking show host and food writer Nathalie Dupree.

In announcing Bass the winner of the 1994 Robert Kennedy Book Award grand prize for Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., Arthur Schlesinger Jr. acclaimed it as "a strong and evocative work that illuminates the struggle for racial justice."

His most recent book, Ol' Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond, co-authored with Marilyn Thompson, was published in November 1998. The Chicago Sun-Times characterized it as "the most entertaining political biography since A. J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana." The New York Times Book Review called it "an engaging chronicle, rich in human detail and political history."

In calling Unlikely Heroes "an important book," Jonathan Yardley wrote, "Jack Bass has done a first-rate job of cutting to the heart of a complex and at times ambiguous subject." Anthony Lewis wrote that Bass "has brought this recent history to life, telling us much that we had not known."

David Broder characterized Transformation of Southern Politics as "a prime source for all those who follow contemporary politics . . . a compelling story with insights on every page."

In a review of The Orangeburg Massacre, Roy Reed wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "It is too often true that the only redress of a great wrong is good reporting of it. . . This book is excellent reporting, and it apparently will stand as the only righting of what went wrong at Orangeburg."