James A. Haught

James A. Haught was born in 1932 in a small West Virginia farm town that had no electricity or paved streets. He graduated from a rural high school with 13 students in the senior class. He came to Charleston, worked as a delivery boy, then became a teen-age apprentice printer at the Charleston Daily Mail in 1951. Developing a yen to be a reporter, Jim volunteered to work without pay in the Daily Mail newsroom on his days off, to learn the trade. This arrangement continued several months, until The Charleston Gazette offered a full-time news job in 1953. He has been at the Gazette ever since – except for a few months in 1959 when he was press aide to Sen. Robert Byrd. During his half-century in newspaper life, Haught has been police reporter, religion columnist, feature writer and night city editor – then he was investigative reporter for 13 years, and his work led to several corruption convictions. In 1983 he was named associate editor, and in 1992 he became editor. He writes nearly 400 Gazette editorials a year, plus occasional personal columns and news articles. Haught has won 19 national news writing awards, and is author of eight books and 60 national magazine articles. Thirty of his columns have been distributed by national syndicates. He also is a senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine. He is listed in Who’s Who in America, and Contemporary Authors. He has four children, 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Personally, he enjoys hiking with Kanawha Trail Club, participating in a philosophy group at Edgewood Summit, and taking grandchildren swimming off his old sailboat at Lake Chaweva, where he lives.

Currently the editor of the CHARLESTON GAZETTE in West Virginia, Mr. Haught has spent more than 50 years as an investigative journalist, columnist, and author. A self-proclaimed skeptic and agnostic, Haught writes and lectures frequently on religious topics, particularly injustices and atrocities committed in the name of religion, and the scientific debunking of supernatural claims.

He is the author of five books, including HOLY HORRORS: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS MURDER AND MADNESS; HOLY HATRED: RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE '90s; and 2000 YEARS OF DISBELIEF, a paean to freethinkers, atheists, and religious doubters. Haught also serves as a senior editor at FREE INQUIRY magazine, published by the Council for Secular Humanism.

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