An acclaimed novelist, essayist, biographer, and critic, Geoffrey Wolff is a prominent voice in contemporary American literature. Wolff is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he is the director of the graduate fiction program. Previously, Wolff has served on the faculties of Istanbul University and of Princeton University and has been book editor at the Washington Post and Newsweek.

Wolff has authored six novels, including The Age of Consent (Knopf, 1995), set in a close-knit utopian community in upstate New York; and The Final Club (Knopf, 1990), about secretive social networks at Princeton. Wolff’s nonfiction works include Black Sun (Random House, 1976), on the short-lived avant-garde poet Harry Crosby; The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara (Knopf, 2003), a literary biography of the American fiction writer; and The Duke of Deception (Random House, 1979),a memoir that was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. His most book The Edge of Maine (National Geographic, 2005) brings together local history and lore, personal memoir, and travelogue in a rich portrayal of the salty, sea-pounded, and seasonally gentrified Maine coast.

Wolff received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. His honors also include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wolff was educated at Cambridge and at Princeton University, from which he graduated summa cum laude.