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Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman -- a product of Yale and the OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer. Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military service, and supported himself with desperately improvised scams, exploiting employers, wives, and, finally, his own son. In The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff unravels the enigma of this Gatsbyesque figure, a bad man who somehow was also a very good father, an inveterate liar who falsified everything but love.
Includes an afterword by the author. Harry Crosby was the godson of J. P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation: these were Crosby’s pastimes until 1929, when he shot his girlfriend, the recent bride of another man, and then himself. Black Sun is novelist and master biographer Geoffrey Wolff’s subtle and striking picture of a man who killed himself to make his life a work of art.
The author recounts the events leading up to his being diagnosed with heart disease, and describes how the crisis led to his new awareness of himself as a husband, father, friend, and writer
A half-Jewish outsider from Seattle must navigate the snobbery and discrimination of 1950s Princeton, learning a bitter-comic lesson about the way of the world.
The PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author recounts coming of age in 1950s Washington State with his mother and abusive stepfather in this classic memoir. This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. As he fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff masterfully re-creates the frustrations, cruelties, and joys of adolescence. His various schemes—running away to ...
Novelist and biographer Geoffrey Wolff has spent many summers in Maine - sailing its coastal waters, climbing its rocky peaks, and communing with its natives. Now, with the voice of a passionate insider, he brings readers into the heart of this striking region and explains what makes it unique. Starting with a gripping tale about being lost offshore in the fog with inadequate navigational aids, Wolff goes on to describe the coast’s geological history and discovery by Europeans. He then turns a keen eye towards Mainers, their mores and peculiarities, and to the summer rusticators who for generations have invaded the stunning waterfronts. A section on boat building celebrates the extraordinary rescue of Maine’s foremost craft; another on lobsters tells the rich story of the custom, taste, commerce, environmental conflict, and scientific mystery surrounding these critical crustaceans. Here is a true feast - travel literature at its best.
In 1895 Joshua Slocum set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the Spray, a thirty-seven-foot sloop. More than three years later, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, and his account of that voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, made him internationally famous. But scandal soon followed, and a decade later, with his finances failing, he set off alone once more—never to be seen again. In this definitive portrait of an icon of adventure, Geoffrey Wolff describes, with authority and admiration, a life that would see hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirate attacks, cholera, smallpox, and no shortage of personal tragedy.
With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed how humour and tragedy dwell in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life.
Violent actions disturb the lives of at least five people--and all five know they will never be the same again.
An enigma of twentieth-century literature-a writer accorded great importance in his time, if less than in his own mind-is here explored by one of our most versatile men of letters, a novelist and biographer ideally suited to the strange case of John O'Hara. The accomplishments are undeniable: "the Region," the fictionalized coal-mining Pennsylvania of O'Hara's youth, serving his work much as Yoknapatawpha County did Faulkner's; an acute vernacular gift and a narrative frankness shocking in his day; an intimate, combative relationship with "The New Yorker "for over four decades; and a handful of books, from "Appointment in Samarra "to "Sermons and Soda Water, " that justify their author's amb...