Clips from Our Interview
with Geoffrey

Geoffrey Wolff was born in 1937 in Hollywood, California, to Duke and Rosemary Wolff. The family split up when Geoffrey was twelve, and he chose to live with his father, while his much younger brother, Tobias, spent his childhood with their mother. Under his father’s tutelage, Geoffrey learned to race motorboats, crash cars, discern great jazz from good, and skip town in the middle of the night. Later he was educated at Choate, Princeton, and Cambridge and taught at a university outside Istanbul before beginning his career writing obituaries for the Washington Post. His works include novels (Bad Debts, Providence, and The Final Club), biographies of Harry Crosby and John O’Hara, a collection of essays, a book about Maine, and a memoir, Duke of Deception, about life with his father. From 1995 to 2006, he was director of the Graduate Program in Writing at University of California, Irvine. Now retired, he lives, with his wife, Priscilla, in New England near their two sons and three grandchildren.