Name Geoffrey Wolff Role Novelist | Siblings Tobias Wolff | |
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Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Nominations Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography Books The Duke Of Deceptio, Black Sun, A day at the beach, The art of burning bridges, The edge of Maine | ||
Geoffrey Wolff (born 1937) is an American novelist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer. Among his honors and recognition are the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994) and fellowships of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy in Berlin (2007), and the Guggenheim Foundation. His younger brother is the writer Tobias Wolff.
Geoffrey Wolff was born in Hollywood, California, to Duke and Rosemary Wolff. His parents separated when he was twelve, his brother living with their mother and Geoffrey with their father. He has described the adventure of his upbringing in an acclaimed memoir of his father, The Duke of Deception (1979), which was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. (Wolff's brother Tobias has treated with similar candor his own upbringing with their mother in a memoir, This Boy's Life.)
Geoffrey Wolff was educated at the Choate School, graduating in 1955; at Princeton (which he anatomized in his 1990 novel Final Club), graduating summa cum laude in 1960; and at Churchill College, Cambridge University. He has taught at Robert College (now Boğaziçi University) in Istanbul, at Princeton, and at the University of California, Irvine, where he was professor of English and comparative literature and, from 1995 to 2006, director of the influential Graduate Fiction Program. He has also been a book editor at the Washington Post and at Newsweek.
He is the author of six novels; biographies of Harry Crosby, John O'Hara, and Joshua Slocum; a volume of essays, and other works of non-fiction in several genres. He has edited a selection of Edward Hoagland's writings.
He lives in Bath, Maine, with his wife Priscilla.
Principal works
