[1][2] Peace grew up in the city of Orange, near Newark, New Jersey and attended Yale University.

[2][3] During the book’s first week of release, it ranked #9 on The New York Times Best Seller List.

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 divide, and Hobbs’s book is an honest, insightful, and empathetic account of his sometimes painful, always strange journey.” [6] The Boston Globe review stated that “[Hobbs] has a tremendous ability to empathize with all of his characters without romanticizing any of them.” [7] The San Francisco Chronicle asked, “Can a man transcend the circumstances into which he’s born?

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.” [8] The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was named a People Magazine “Best Book of Fall,” an O Magazine “Best Book of 2014,” an Entertainment Weekly “10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2014,” a New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014,[9] a finalist for the 2015 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography,[10] iBooks Best Nonfiction of 2014, and a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist in Biography & History.