Literature in the Courtyard: Hampton Sides with Tom McGuane

The Johann Fust Library Foundation is honored that Hampton Sides will be our featured author at Literature in the Courtyard 2025. This is the fourth year of this annual event, which was endowed by former library foundation president and long-time board member Cotton Hanley.

Hampton will speak about his most recent work, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. Like his other works of historical nonfiction, it is a luminous narrative.

Many Boca Grande residents will recall that Hampton spoke on Boca Grande in 2016. Those who had a chance to hear him then remember what an exciting and dramatic story he told with his bestselling book In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette. Readers and critics note that Hampton brings a fresh perspective to little-known stories. He is best known for his gripping true adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of exploration. His other bestselling narrative histories include Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound On His Trail, and On Desperate Ground. 

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. 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 recent 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.

Hampton Sides will be in conversation with Tom McGuane. Tom’s impressive body of work includes ten novels, four short story collections, and three nonfiction works. He also wrote four screenplays: Rancho Deluxe,  The Missouri Breaks, Tom Horn, and 92 in the Shade – which he also directed. In 2018, Tom released Cloudbursts, thirty-eight pieces of collected and new stories. The book was a Wall Street Journal "Ten Best Books of the Year" selection.  In Tom's fiction, original characters play out compelling human dramas against backdrops of vivid American landscapes. 

His many honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, election to the prestigious Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Book Award nomination. In addition to his many literary accolades, he was elected to the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame and the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame.