Background

George Higgins was born on November 13, 1939, in Brockton, Massachusetts, United States. He is a son of John Thompson Higgins and Doris (Montgomery) Higgins. He was the only child of an Irish-American family.

Education

George Higgins studied at Rockland High School and graduated in 1957. He studied at Boston College, where he was an editor of the campus literary magazine, Stylus, and graduated in 1961. He also studied at Stanford University from 1961 to 1965 and received a Master of Arts degree. In 1965, Higgins entered Boston College Law School where he received a Juris Doctor degree in 1967.

Career

George Higgins started his career as a journalist for the Providence, Rhode Island Journal and Evening Bulletin. He also worked for the Associated Press in Springfield and Boston. In 1967, he took up a post of a deputy assistant attorney general and in 1969 he started to work as an assistant attorney general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Higgins worked as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts from 1970 to 1973 and as a special assistant U.S. attorney from 1973 to 1974.

Higgins started a private practice of law in 1973 and was active for ten years. He defended against criminal charges such clients as the Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy and the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Higgins was a consultant at National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Law, Washington, D.C. and an instructor in trial practice at Boston College Law School. In 1988 Higgins worked as a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also worked a professor of creative writing at Boston University from 1988 to 1999.

George Higgins published his first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, in 1970. He wrote more than twenty novels. The majority of his written work is in the crime, mystery, and suspense genres, like his 1999 Agent. He is the author of the book series about Jerry Kennedy. His last novel, At End of Day, was published after his death. He also published nonfiction books about politics and baseball. In 1990, Higgins published On Writing, a book of hard-bitten advice for aspiring writers.

Achievements

• George Higgins was an American writer, journalist and educator who was famous for his books such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Cogan's Trade and The Agent. He established the Boston noir genre of gangster tales. Two films were adapted from his novels: The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1973 and Killing Them Softly in 2012.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Progress of the Seasons

    (Why do certain professional athletes achieve immortality ...)

    1989
  • Sandra Nichols Found Dead: A Novel

    (Appointed by former classmate Judge Henry Lawler to prose...)

    1996
  • Style Versus Substance

    (This analysis and warning about the dangerous mix of poli...)

    1984
  • Kennedy for the Defense

    (Brimming with a bevy of bimbos, bent cops and bad actors,...)

    1980
  • Penance for Jerry Kennedy

    (With crackling dialogue and biting humor, Penance for Jer...)

    1985
  • Cogan's Trade

    (A hard-hitting, tour-de force tale of the mob and the man...)

    1974
  • At End of Day

    (Inspired by a true story, At End of Day frames a vivid an...)

    2000
  • The Friends of Eddie Coyle

    (The classic novel from "America's best crime novelist" (T...)

    1970
  • Defending Billy Ryan 1992
  • A Change of Gravity 1997
  • The friends of Richard Nixon 1975
  • Sins of the Fathers 1988

Views

George Higgins was criticized for the writing style that made his crime novels so realistic. The majority of narration was left to the characters themselves, and he focused on their dialogue to bring his stories to life.

Quotations: "If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• He is a writer against whom other writers compare their talents. Elmore "Dutch" Leonard, David Mamet, John Gregory Dunne, Mordecai Richler, and Ward Just each cite Higgins as influential to their work. The quality of his dialogue is nearly unmatched in twentieth-century literature. He has brought about a renewed interest in New England's customs, history, and people. Yet, since his early novels, Higgins have never attained the broad readership that would have made his oeuvre part of the literary canon.
  
  Like Joyce, Higgins uses language in torrents, beautifully crafted, ultimately intending to create a panoramic impression. The plot of a Higgins novel – suspense, humor, and tragedy – is a blurrily perceived skeleton within the monsoon of dialogue.

Connections

George Higgins was married to Elizabeth Mulkerin Higgins. The marriage produced two children. George and Elizabeth divorced in 1979. Later George Higgins married to Loretta Cubberley Higgins.

Father:

John Thompson Higgins

Mother:

Doris Montgomery

ex-wife:

Elizabeth Mulkerin

Wife:

Loretta Cubberley Higgins

Daughter:

Susan Higgins

Son:

John Higgins