The Duke of Deception

Abundant with the complexities and contradictions of family sympathy…First-rate autobiography, conscientious and intimate….It is as lucid and complicated…as a good novel.”

– John Irving, The New York Times Book Review



“An enormously moving story of familial love and hate and coming-of-age…No man can finish this book without resolving to take stock of his relationship with his own father….The claim on the reader is very large indeed.”

– Newsday

“Beautifully written…rich in anecdote…resonant with conflicting emotions, from adoration to anger, from gratitude to guilt, from pride to pity.”

– Village Voice

Geoffrey Wolff is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, biographer, and critic, and a prominent voice in contemporary American literature. Educated at Cambridge and at Princeton, from which he graduated summa cum laude, he is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was the Director of the Graduate Fiction Program from 1995 to 2006. Previously, he served on the faculties of Istanbul University and Princeton University and has been a book editor at the Washington Post and Newsweek.

He is the author of six novels, including The Age of Consent and The Final Club. His nonfiction books include Black Sun, The Art of Burning Bridges- A Life of John O’Hara, The Duke of Deception, a memoir that was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize; The Edge of Maine, and The Hard Way Around- The Passages of Joshua Slocum.

He received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and his honors also include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. During 2007, he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Bath, Maine with his family.

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