Adam Hochschild (born 1942) is an American writer.

Hochschild was born in New York City, as the only child of Harold Hochschild, a mining company executive. As a teenager, Hochschild visited South Africa and became aware to the injustices of racism. He subsequently become active politically, joining the civil-rights movement, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and working as a reporter for the leftwing Ramparts magazine. Subsequently, he was one of the co-founders of Mother Jones.

Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son (1986), in which he described the difficult relationship he had with his father. His later books were The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990), The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994), Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, and King Leopold's Ghost (1998), a book about the colonization of the Congo by Belgium's King Leopold II. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, published in January 2005, is about the antislavery movement in the British Empire. His books have been translated into twelve languages.

Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.