Jack Hitt

Between 2017 and 2018, Hitt co-hosted the Gimlet Media podcast Uncivil along with Chenjerai Kumanyika. The episode of Uncivil titled "The Raid" won a Peabody award in 2017.

In 2012, Hitt was interviewed on The Colbert Report about his novel Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character.

Between 2012 and 2013, Hitt performed a one-man show he wrote about his childhood and the outlandish characters he's met in his life called Making Up The Truth.

Jack Hitt's older brother Robert M. Hitt III served as Secretary of Commerce for the state of South Carolina from January 2011 to June 2021.

Hit was interviewed for two documentaries; Split: A Divided America (2008) and for Tower to the People (2015).

This American Life won a Peabody Award in 2006 for "Habeas Schmabeas."

Hitt's New York Times Magazine piece about a dying language called "Say No More" was selected for inclusion in The Best American Travel Writing 2005. A piece originally published in Harper's titled "Mighty White of You: Racial Preferences Color America's Oldest Skulls and Bones" was selected for inclusion in Best American Science Writing 2006. Another piece from Harper's titled "Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit", was included in Ira Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction (2007).

Since 1996, Hitt has also been a contributing editor to the radio series This American Life. Showrunner Ira Glass wrote an announcement for Hitt's show that included a listing of what he considered to be stand out episodes of This American Life that Hitt had contributed to. That list included: "Fiasco," a story about a production of Peter Pan gone wrong; "The Super," a story about a superintendent Hitt had in New York City who was a former member of a Brazilian death squad; "Dawn," a story about his Charleston neighbor Dawn Langley Simmons (an early recipient of sex reassignment surgery); "The Middle of Nowhere," a story about the small pacific island of Nauru; and "Habeas Schmabeas," a story that contained multiple interviews with prisoners who had served time at Guantanamo Bay.

Jack Hitt and Paul Tough are both listed as consultants for the movie Hackers (1995).

In 1990, he received the Livingston Award, along with Paul Tough, for an article they wrote about computer hackers that was published in Esquire. Jack has written and edited multiple books, and has had articles selected for inclusion in Best American Science Writing 2006, Best American Travel Writing 2005, and in Ira Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction (2007). In 2006, an episode of This American Life that Jack contributed to called "Habeus Schmabeus" won a Peabody Award. Hitt also co-hosted the Gimlet Media Podcast Uncivil along with Chenjerai Kumanyiki between 2017 and 2018. Uncivil won a Peabody award in 2017 for the episode titled "The Raid".

Hitt lived in an apartment in New York City for about 8 years before he met and married his current wife Lisa Sanders in the late 1980s. They live together in New Haven, Connecticut and have two daughters.

Hitt graduated from the University of the South in 1979.

John T. L. "Jack" Hitt was born in 1957 in Charleston, South Carolina to Ann Leonard Hitt and Robert Hitt Jr. He was the youngest of five children. He was raised in Charleston and attended the Porter-Gaud School. At Porter-Gaude, Hitt got his start in writing by contributing to and editing the school's literary magazine. While growing up in Charleston, Hitt lived in the same neighborhood as Dawn Langley Simmons who would receive one of the first sex reassignment surgeries in the United States.