Biographical Sketch
Edward Humes (born in Philadelphia, PA, USA) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and nonfiction writer.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for specialized reporting in 1989 for investigative stories he wrote about the United States military for the Orange County Register. Afterwards, he began writing non-fiction books. His publications include the bestselling Mississippi Mud; No Matter How Loud I Shout; Baby E.R.; A Man and His Mountain; Garbology (a popular selection for the First Year Experience program on college campuses) and the PEN-Award-winning No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court. In 2001, Hum,es spent a year teaching a writing workshop at Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, a middle-class Los Angeles suburb. His observations while at the school led to his narrative non-fiction book School of Dreams, published in 2004. Humes has written for, inter alia, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and he is a contributing writer for Sierra Magazine, California Lawyer, and Los Angeles Magazine, as well as several other publications.
Read more about Edward Humes on Wikipedia.
Major Awards and Honors
Pulitzer Prize (USA)
- 1989: Specialized Reporting – For Humes’s in-depth reporting in the Orange County Register on the military establishment in Southern California.
PEN Center Literary Awards (USA)
- 1997: Research Nonfiction – No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
Bibliography
True crime
- Buried Secrets: A True Story of Serial Murder (1991)
- Murderer With a Badge: The Secret Life of a Rogue Cop (1992)
- Mississippi Mud: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia (1995)
- Burned: A Story of Murder and the Crime that Wasn’t (2019)
Other Nonfiction
- No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court (1997)
- Mean Justice (2003)
- School of Dreams : Making the Grade at a Top American High School (2004)
- My California: Journeys by Great Writers (2004)
- Baby ER: The Heroic Doctors and Nurses Who Perform Medicine’s Tiniest Miracles (2004)
- Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream (2006)
- Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul (2007)
- Talk Radio Evolution
– Article, The Huffington Post, February 23, 2007. - Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet (2009)
- Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (2011)
- Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash (2012)
- A Man and his Mountain (2013)
- Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (2016)
A Selection of Quotes
No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor’s traditional solution — the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid’s lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?”
“These kids are already hard. They don’t need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They’ve lost that. That’s what we need to give back to them.”
Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
“Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.”
Find more quotes by Edward Humes on Goodreads.