John A. Hostetler

John A. Hostetler (29 October 1918–8 August 2001) was an American author, educator, and scholar of Amish and Hutterite societies. Some of his works are still in print.

John Andrew Hostetler was born to an Old Order Amish family in the Kishacoquillas Valley (known locally as the Big Valley) region of Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, the fifth of seven children of Joseph and Nancy Hostetler. At the age of eleven, his parents moved to Iowa. As a youth he supervised his father's turkey operation, took courses on poultry raising, and received a poultry-judging license from the American Poultry Association. He discovered that he enjoyed reading more than raising turkeys and feeding hogs. He was sixteen when his essay "Some Effects of Alcohol and Tobacco" was published by the Mennonite youth paper The Words of Cheer. Never baptized in the Amish church, Hostetler joined the Mennonite Church in 1935. He attended Hesston College in 1941, but with US involvement in World War II, he was called to the draft. Utilizing a religious exemption from active duty, Hostetler, as a conscientious objector, was assigned to Civilian Public Service in several locations. After the war, he graduated from Goshen College with a degree in sociology (1949). While at Goshen he assisted dean Harold S. Bender by writing articles on the Amish and similar groups for the four-volume Mennonite Encyclopedia which Bender was editing, beginning a productive and prolific academic career.

Hostetler married Hazel Schrock in June 1949. They moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where he began graduate studies in rural sociology at the Pennsylvania State University. In 1951, his wife and a daughter died in childbirth, the same year that Hostetler's Annotated Bibliography on the Amish won the University of Chicago's annual Folklore Prize. In 1953 Hostetler married Beulah Stauffer, a book editor at Herald Press. They had three daughters, and their marriage marked the beginning of a 48-year collaboration on many projects. He died in 2001 at the age of 82.

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