Publications:  Books

Geoffrey Douglas author - Class

Class: The Wreckage of an American Family

Archie Douglas and Ellie Reed met at a cocktail party in a New York townhouse in the fall of 1937. He was a Wall Street broker, the son of an heiress, handsome, trust-funded, Yale-educated, a young man with his future on a plate. She was buoyant, beautiful, Social Registered, a fashion model for whom life was a party that never ran down. Their marriage began with a honeymoon in Cuba and ended with her suicide in New York. The thirteen years between were an endless gaudy whirl of glitter and gaiety, hurtling closer by the year to the perils that underlay it: alcoholism, debauchery and abuse.

The son of that marriage, whose last memory of his mother was finding her dead, resurrects those years. Drawing on his own memories and those of others, as well as a wealth of records, diaries, letters and keepsakes, he offers a vision of corrupted privilege as haunting as it is personal.

This is the story of the passage of a family from its beginnings: from the making of a nineteenth-century copper fortune through the nannies, trust funds and private schools it bought, to its final, awful end. It is a tale of waste and loss, a story of old money gone bad. An American tragedy.

amazon-logo_white
Geoffrey Douglas author - Dead Opposite

Dead Opposite:
The Lives and Loss of Two American Boys

In the early morning of February 17, 1991, a nineteen-year-old Yale student on his way home from a party was shot through the heart on a New Haven street by a single bullet from a .22-caliber handgun. His wallet, with forty-six dollars inside, was left intact beside him. As murders go, it was senseless, motiveless, and as random as a blindly flung stone. The boy was white, privileged, and widely loved, a scholar and athlete, with a future that seemed assured. The boy accused in his killing, a sixteen-year-old gang member from the inner city, was an angry, desperate youth whose life careened almost daily — as ghetto lives often do — between the never-distant prospects of jail and death.

Dead Opposite is the story of these two boys — and of the boys and men, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, and friends who peopled their lives. It is a story of hope and hopelessness, ignorance and rage; of waste and courage and loss. But above all, it is the story of the chasm that divides us one from the other: black from white; rich from poor; the suburbs of Chevy Chase, Maryland, from the squalor and despair of New Haven’s meanest streets. At the same time, though, it is the story of the commonness that links us all — the love of a parent, the dreams of a child — and how in the end they join us, one to the other, as the humans we finally, sometimes sadly, are.

amazon-logo_white
Geoffrey Douglas author - The Game of Their Lives

The Game of Their Lives

In the late spring of 1950, eleven young immigrants’ sons, most of them strangers to each other, came together for the love and fun of a game of soccer. They came from Missouri, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, from jobs in canneries, brickyards, post offices, classrooms, and bars, to play for their country in the 1950 World Cup, resulting in what has since been called, by scores of sources for more than forty years, the greatest upset victory in the history of American sports. But no one in America at the time paid attention. Their only public honor — roughly twenty minutes’ worth — was from a throng of strangers in a Brazilian mining town.

This is the story of the lives of these men: their jobs, wives, sweethearts, neighborhoods, the innocence of their era, the anonymity in which they worked and played. It is the story of heroism, stoicism, and simple unsung grace. Of a time before television, endorsement contracts, movie rights for serial killers, and seven-figure idols who denigrate us all. And ultimately — though it is not a sports story — it is the story of a game, played brilliantly. A single game of soccer, the greater game of life.

_ _ _ _ _

Watch the movie trailer — The Game of Their Lives:

Geoffrey Douglas author - Classmates

The Classmates:
Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era

Fifty years ago, in the fall of 1957, two thirteen-year-old boys were enrolled at an elite, boys-only New England boarding school. One of them, descended from wealth and eminence, would go on to Yale, then to a career as a navy officer and Vietnam war hero, and finally to the U.S. Senate, from where he would fall just short of the White House. The other was a scholarship student, a misfit giant of a boy from a Pennsylvania farm town who would suffer shameful debasements at the hands of his classmates, then go on to a solitary and largely anonymous life as a salesman of encyclopedias and trailer parts — before dying, alone, twelve months after his classmate’s narrow loss on Election Day 2004.

It is around these two figures, John Kerry and a boy known here only as Arthur, the bookends of a class of one hundred boys, that Geoffrey Douglas — himself a member of that boarding-school class — builds this remarkable memoir. His portrait of their lives and the lives of five others in that class — two more Vietnam veterans with vastly divergent stories, a federal judge, a gay New York artist who struggled for years to find his place in the world, and Douglas himself — offers a memorable look back to a generation caught between the expectations of their fathers and the sometimes terrifying pulls of a society driven by war, defiance, and self-doubt.

Geoffrey Douglas author - The Grifter the Poet and the Runaway Train

The Grifter, the Poet, and the Runaway Train:
Stories from a Yankee Writer’s Notebook

There are seventeen stories here, reported and written over roughly twenty years. All of them unfold within the six states of New England, though they could as easily have happened anywhere. Several recount public events, widely reported: a Maine town turning against itself under the weight of an influx of Somalis, a fatal fire in Worcester MA, a Vermont reporter’s defense of marriage equality, resulting in a Pulitzer Prize. Others, the majority, are more private, the stories of men and women surviving, facing choices, living life: a small-time jockey scratching out an existence at county-fair racetracks; a local police chief’s terrible moral quandary; a Massachusetts poet’s love affair with his town. A few are essays, the most recent a mapping of a young man’s path toward suicide.

Some have won honors. A story on the nine-day life of a half-formed infant — and his parents’ struggle to understand — was a National Magazine award finalist; a piece detailing the double life of a Boston office worker was a selection for Best American Sports Stories. Several have been anthologized.

The best of these, taken together, make for a rich collection of New England portraits: mostly ordinary lives, upended by choice or chance, turned suddenly, unexpectedly remarkable. One or two would qualify as period pieces, their contexts already obsolete. If there is a single theme linking them all (other than the region), it is the simple, undressed grit of those involved.

This book, and my work in general, are well described, I think, in a news story that followed its publication … read the Valley News story here.

Enjoy this 2019 interview with me on NPR’s Radio Boston.

A writer with a voice so natural and compelling, I’m guessing you won’t stop reading for hours once you start.

– Yankee editor Mel Allen