Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff (born June 19, 1945, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.) is an American writer who is primarily known for his memoirs and for his short stories, in which many voices and a wide range of emotions are skillfully depicted.

Wolff’s parents divorced when he was a child. From the age of 10, he traveled with his mother, who relocated frequently and finally settled in Seattle, Washington, where she remarried. Wolff wrote about his childhood in the 1950s, including his relationship with his abusive stepfather, in This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (1989; film 1993), which was perhaps his best-known work. His older brother, the novelist Geoffrey Wolff, was brought up by their father (an aeronautical engineer and a pathological liar) and wrote about his childhood in The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (1979). The brothers were reunited when Tobias was a young teenager.

Wolff served in the military as a paratrooper during the Vietnam War, after which he was educated at the University of Oxford (B.A., 1972; M.A., 1975) and Stanford University (M.A., 1978). He was appointed writer in residence at Syracuse (New York) University, where he taught from 1980 to 1997. His first published collections of short stories were In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981; U.K. title, Hunters in the Snow) and Back in the World (1985). Wolff also edited several anthologies of short stories, including Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories (1983), A Doctor’s Visit: Short Stories by Anton Chekhov (1988), and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (1994).

Later works by Wolff include the memoir In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of a Lost War (1994), about his experiences and maturation in Vietnam, and The Night in Question (1996), a collection of 14 stories, many of which again reflect Wolff’s time in Vietnam. The novel Old School (2003) is a penetrating look at what happens when a prep-school student plagiarizes someone else’s work in an attempt to win a literary competition. A latter collection of short stories, Our Story Begins, appeared in 2008.

Wolff was the recipient of numerous awards, notably the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for the novella The Barracks Thief (1984), which follows the lives of three young paratroopers who are awaiting their orders to be shipped out to Vietnam. Wolff also won three O. Henry Awards (1980, 1981, and 1985). In 2015 he received the National Medal of Arts.