Hochschild was born in New York City as the only child of Harold Hochschild, an extremely successful businessman who was the head of Amax, one of the largest mining concerns in the world. He grew up in the rarified but isolated world of upper-class luxury, which he detailed in his first book, Half the way home: a Memoir of Father and Son, published in 1986.

After Hochschild visited South Africa and became awakened to the injustices of racism, he become increasingly active politically. He joined the civil-rights movement, he demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and he got a job as a reporter for Ramparts magazine. Subsequently he co-founded Mother Jones.

His later books were The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990) and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994). Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, and King Leopold's Ghost (1998), an acclaimed book about the colonizaton of the Congo by Belgium's Leopold II of Belgium.

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.

Through the Adam Hochschild Charitable Trust/Sequoia Fund, whose stated tax-exempt purpose is to "promote the charitable literary and educational purposes of Foundation for National Progress", Hochschild funds the publishing of Mother Jones.