The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, substance use, mental illness, pregnancy loss, and death.

Jeff Hobbs is the author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. He was Rob’s friend and roommate at Yale. Hobbs appears in the memoir and presents himself as a minor figure in Rob’s story. The author charts his career as a writer, his marriage, his wife’s miscarriages, and the eventual birth of their first child while foregrounding Rob’s experiences. By piecing together Rob’s story, Hobbs attempts to identify the factors that contributed to his eventual murder. However, Hobbs emphasizes that this memoir is “a book about Rob’s life, not his death” (403), and he aims to portray it as accurately as possible.

Hobbs clarifies that he was conscious of his position of privilege as a white man who came from a financially well-off family while writing this biography of his Black, socioeconomically disadvantaged friend. He freely admits that he is the son of a doctor, his family home was “an eighteenth-century farmhouse on fifteen acres” (130), and that he attended private schools. He also acknowledges that a few of Rob’s friends “were doubtful of [his] ability to tell Rob’s story, which was of course a valid doubt” (403).