Class: The Wreckage of an American Family

by Geoffrey Douglas

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 father's alcoholism and mother's suicide. Reprint.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Geoffrey Douglas is the author of six books --five of nonfiction and one novel--and more than 100 magazine pieces, many of them widely anthologized. A former reporter, editor, columnist, and adjunct professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, he has been a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a writer-in-residence at several schools and universities.
His most recent work, "Love in a Dark Place" (2025), described by Kirkus Reviews as "a moving, unflinching novel about human depravity and the way love can coexist in its menacing presence," is set in 1980s Atlantic City, where Douglas worked at the time as editor of an investigative weekly.
Other books include two widely-reviewed memoirs -- "Class" (1992) and “The Classmates" (2008) -- as well as "The Game of Their Lives “ (1996), an account of the 1950 U.S. World Cup soccer team and the immigrant men who composed it, adapted as a 2005 movie of the same name. His fifth book, “The Grifter, The Poet, and The Runaway Train: Stories From a Yankee Writer’s Notebook" (2019), is a compilation of his stories in Yankee, written over 20 years.

Reviews

[Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a chance to meet the author, Geoffrey Douglas, a couple of months ago, when he visited our campus and had dinner in my home. He read aloud from his first book,Class--a memoir of his troubled childhood--and also from his latest book, Classmates. He has a fine command of the English language, but he is quite simply consumed by his own point of view. He rails against the value system of his parents and accuses them of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, while exhibiting the very same characteristics himself. His parents were prejudiced against ethnic minorities and Democrats; the author is prejudiced against white, Republicans. He was very outspoken about this during his public reading,and I--who had just served as his hostess at dinner--was offended about this, being white and Republican myself.

If you'd like to revel in 250 pages of political correctness, Class is the book for you.