Author Website
Where else can you find my books? Gibson’s Bookstore (Concord), The Norwich Bookstore, (Norwich VT), Barnes and Noble (West Lebanon)
Geoffrey Douglas
I’m the author of five nonfiction books and one novel (my most recent one), published between 1992-2026. One of these, The Game of Their Lives, was adapted for a 2005 movie of the same name. I’ve also worked as a reporter, columnist, editor and publisher, and am the author of many magazine pieces, a number of them for Yankee. From 2000 to 2008, I was an adjunct professor of writing at UMass Lowell, and have also served as writer–in-residence at several schools and colleges For several years through the 1980s, I was editor of an investigative weekly in Atlantic City, an experience that provided much of the grist for this latest book, Love in a Dark Place, my first work of fiction.
The writers whose work have reached deepest inside me are, in no particular order or chronology: Russell Banks, Richard Ford, Andre Dubus senior, Earnest Hemingway, Susan Minot, Norman Maclean and–going back a bit farther–Charles Dickens.
I live today with my wife in West Lebanon NH.
Books
Our Commitment to Giving Back
I’m involved with a locally-based group, Partners in Global Change, that supports a small orphanage of 20 children, the Tysea Home, in Jacmel, Haiti. The home is supported through donations alone and can use all the help it/we can get. For more information, contact me directly on my website.
Class: The Wreckage of an American Family
The scion of a New York family chronicles the making of its nineteenth-century copper fortune; the servants, nannies, private schools, and vacation homes he enjoyed; and his mother’s suicide.
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. Geoffrey Douglas tells the 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. You will see and hear both stories. And by the end, you not only will have touched the differences of race, wealth, education, and hope, but will have seen and heard also the commonness that links us all–the love of a parent, the dreams of a child–that joins us, one to the other, as the humans we finally, sometimes sadly, are.
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.
Geoffrey Douglas’s The Game of Their Lives 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.
The Classmates
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.
The class of 1962 was not so different from any other, with its share of swaggerers and shining stars, outcasts and scholarship students. Its distinction was in its timing: at the precise threshold of the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s. The world these boys had been trained to enter and to lead, a world very similar to their fathers’, would be exploded and recast almost at the moment of their entrance–forcing choices whose consequences were sometimes lifelong. Douglas’s chronicle of those times and choices is both a capsule history of an era and a literary tour de force.
The Grifter, The Poet and The Runaway Train
For over 20 years, Geoffrey Douglas has written feature-length pieces for Yankee magazine that chronicle extraordinary stories that have taken place in New England. Some have been about 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. Others, have been 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; the long, sad fall of a Maine lottery winner, a poet’s love affair with his town. The best of these, taken together, make for a rich and updated collection of New England portraits: mostly ordinary lives, upended by choice or chance, turned suddenly, unexpectedly remarkable.
Love In a Dark Place
October 2017, north of Boston. The body of a 60-year-old drug addict and former prostitute is pulled from the Shawsheen River. The only person questioned is a former lover from decades before, now an aging English professor at a nearby college. The death is ruled accidental.
August 1984, Atlantic City. Ten casinos are taking in $5 million a day; the Bruno crime family, following a deadly mob war, is in control of the city’s rackets: loan-sharking, protection, fight-fixing, high-end prostitution. Among its most prized assets is a 28-year-old, $1,000-a-night escort named Sarah—beautiful and spirited, but deeply guarded, tethered to her mob bosses by an unknowable secret.
Harry Hopper, a local news reporter known for his deep digs into the resort’s darkest corners, comes to know her and is soon obsessed with the shadows she casts, then with Sarah herself. The two become lovers.
But the secrets don’t yield. And the dangers are too great. The years pass. There is an ending. Then a new beginning–but in a very different world.