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Biography
American

Geoffrey Wolff

1937

Geoffrey Wolff is the author of The Duke of Deception (1979), a memoir about his con-artist father that is one of the finest works of American autobiography and a foundational text in the modern memoir genre. He is also a novelist and literary critic whose fiction and nonfiction explore deception, self-invention, and the American capacity for reinvention. His brother Tobias Wolff is also a celebrated writer; the two brothers were separated when their parents divorced, and each wrote a memoir about their respective parent — creating one of the most remarkable paired autobiographies in American literature.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Geoffrey Ansell Wolff (b. 5 November 1937) was born in Los Angeles. His father, Arthur “Duke” Wolff, was an elaborate con man who fabricated credentials, identities, and histories. When his parents divorced, Geoffrey went with his father and his brother Tobias went with their mother — a separation that produced two of the great American memoirs: Geoffrey’s The Duke of Deception and Tobias’s This Boy’s Life.

Life and Career

The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (1979) traces Arthur Wolff’s life of fraud — fake Yale credentials, fabricated war records, bounced checks, abandoned families — through his son’s eyes. The memoir is simultaneously a portrait of a monstrous father and an investigation of the American mythology of self-invention. It influenced every major memoir that followed.

Wolff also published several novels and the nonfiction work The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara (2003). He directed the graduate writing programme at the University of California, Irvine, for many years.

Major Works and Themes

Wolff writes about deception and self-invention — the American belief that you can become whoever you claim to be, and the damage that belief produces when it is taken to its pathological extreme.

Key Works

  • The Duke of Deception (1979)
  • The Art of Burning Bridges (2003)

Collecting Wolff

The Duke of Deception (1979, Viking) first edition brings $30–$80.