The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

First edition (publ. Scribner)

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (2014) is a biography by Jeff Hobbs about his friend and college roommate, an intellectually brilliant young African-American man, Robert DeShaun Peace (June 25, 1980 – May 18, 2011). Peace grew up in the city of Orange, near Newark, New Jersey and attended Yale University. While telling the story of Peace’s life chronologically, the book focuses on Peace’s many important relationships with family and friends as well as the systemic racism within American housing, education, justice, and banking systems that affected nearly every aspect of Peace’s life.

Early life

Born to Jackie Peace and Robert Douglas, Robert Peace grew up in Orange, New Jersey, which borders Newark. Rob lived with his mother and grandparents and excelled in school while attending church and forming strong friendships in his neighborhood. When Rob was seven, his father was arrested for an alleged murder, convicted, and sent to prison. Rob visited him often in prison and his father remained an important part of his life. His mother worked long hours primarily in school and hospital cafeterias and sacrificed to send her son to St. Benedict's Preparatory School, a private middle and high school. There, he excelled academically (4.0 GPA) and athletically (captaining the swimming and water polo teams) and upon graduation was the school’s student body leader and recipient of the Presidential Award.

Yale University

After high school, Peace was sponsored by Charles Cawley, a bank executive, to attend Yale University, where he majored in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. He played on the school’s club water polo team, which he co-captained for two years. He worked in a cancer and infectious disease laboratory associated with the Yale Medical School. Peace also worked in the dining hall as a dishwasher and earned money selling marijuana to his classmates. Peace graduated in 2002 with honors. One of his roommates was Jeff Hobbs, an English major from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. While in college, Peace remained involved with his father’s ongoing legal case, firmly believing that his father was both set up by the police and also deprived of a fair trial due to his race and indigent circumstances.

Career and death

After graduation from Yale, Peace taught biology and coached water polo for five years at his high school alma mater in Newark, NJ, winning a Teacher of the Year award. He continued to work toward proving his father’s innocence until Robert Douglas was diagnosed and later lost to brain cancer, still in prison, when Peace was 26 years old. Peace began a new career working at Newark Liberty International Airport, where he used employee standby flight benefits to travel the world extensively. He spent a great amount of time in Rio de Janeiro while back home he initiated a real estate venture intended renovate abandoned homes and improve his neighborhood. In his late 20s, while he refocused on his academic pursuits and began applying to graduate programs, he continued to sell marijuana on a small scale. He was murdered, aged 30, in a drug-related shooting during a home invasion.

Rob Peace (film)

Main article: Rob Peace

A film adaptation of Peace's story entitled Rob Peace was released in August, 2024. Filmed in Newark, New Jersey, it is written and directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor with a cast including Ejiofor, Mary J. Blige, Camila Cabello, Michael Kelly, and Jay Will (actor) in the title role.

Reception & Awards

During the book’s first week of release, it ranked #9 on The New York Times Best Seller List . In the paper’s Books of the Times review, Janet Maslin called the book “a haunting work of nonfiction.” and in the The New York Times Book Review Anand Giridharadas called the book “mesmeric” and wrote, “[Hobbs] asks the consummate American question: is it possible to reinvent yourself, to sculpture your own destiny?…That one man can contain such contradictions makes for an astonishing, tragic story. In Hobbs’s hands, though, it becomes something more: an interrogation of our national creed of self-invention…” Writing for the Los Angeles Times Hector Tobar commented that “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is a book that is as much about class as it is race. Peace traveled across America’s widening social divid, and Hobbs’s book is an honest, insightful, and empathetic account of his sometimes painful, always strange journey.” The Boston Globe review stated that “[Hobbs] has a tremendous ability to empathize with all of his characters without romanticizing any of them.” The San Francisco Chronicle asked, “Can a man transcend the circumstances into which he’s born? Can he embody two wildly-divergent souls? To what degree are all of us, more or less, slaves to our environments?…As Hobbs reveals in tremendously moving and painstaking detail, [Peace] may have never had a chance.”

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was named a People Magazine “Best Book of Fall,” a O Magazine “Best Book of 2014,” an Entertainment Weekly “10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2014,” a New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014 , a finalist for the 2015 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography , iBooks Best Nonfiction of 2014, a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist in Biography & History .

• Runner up for the 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction
• Winner Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest in 2014