Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American short story writer, memoirist, and novelist. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994). He has written two novels, including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and an array of short stories. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015.
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Life and career
Tobias Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, the son of Rosemary (Loftus) and Arthur Samuels Wolff, an aeronautical engineer. Wolff's father was from a Jewish background, though Wolff did not discover that until he was an adult (Wolff himself is Catholic). Wolff lived with his mother in Newhalem, Washington up in the North Cascade Mountains, while his brother and father lived on the East Coast. He and his mother had drifted from place to place before she finally remarried and relocated to Newhalem. As a kid Wolff busied himself with a local paper route as well as attending Boy Scouts. After attending Concrete High School in Concrete, Washington, Wolff applied to and was accepted by The Hill School under the self-embellished name Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff III. He had forged his transcripts and recommendation letters in order to get in and was later expelled. He served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War era. He holds a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford (1972) and an M.A. from Stanford University. In 1975, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford.
Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, where he has taught classes in English and creative writing since 1997. He also served as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford from 2000 to 2002.
Prior to his current appointment at Stanford, Wolff taught at Syracuse University from 1980 to 1997. While at Syracuse he served on the faculty with Raymond Carver and was an instructor in the graduate writing program. Authors who worked with Wolff while they were students at Syracuse include Jay McInerney, Tom Perrotta, George Saunders, Alice Sebold, William Tester, Paul Griner, Ken Garcia, Dana C. Kabel, Jan-Marie Spanard, and Paul Watkins.
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Writing
Wolff is best known for his work in two genres: the short story and the memoir. His first short story collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, was published in 1981. The collection was well received and several of its stories have since reappeared in a number of anthologies. Its publication coincided with a period in which several American authors who worked almost exclusively in the short story form were receiving wider recognition. As writers like Wolff, Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus became better known, many proclaimed that the United States was in the midst of a renaissance of the short story. (The 20th-century North American version of realism these writers used was often labelled Dirty realism).
Wolff repudiated this characterization. In 1994, in the introduction to The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, he wrote:
To judge from the respectful attention this renaissance has received from reviewers and academics, you would think that it actually happened. It did not. This is a rhetorical flourish to give glamour, even valor, to the succession of one generation by another. The problem with the word "renaissance" is that it needs a dark age to justify itself. I can't think of one, myself... The truth is that the short story form has reliably inspired brilliant performances by our best writers, in a line unbroken since the time of Poe.
Wolff's 1984 novella The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for 1985. Most of the action takes place at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where three recent paratrooper training graduates are temporarily attached to an airborne infantry company as they await orders to report to Vietnam. Because most of the men in the company fought together in Vietnam, the three newcomers are treated as outsiders and ignored. When money and personal property are discovered missing from the barracks, suspicion falls on the three newcomers. The narrative structure of the book contains several shifts of tone and point of view as the story unfolds.
In 1985, Wolff's second short story collection, Back in the World was published. Several of the stories in this collection, such as "The Missing Person," are significantly longer than the stories in his first collection.
Wolff chronicled his early life in two memoirs. This Boy's Life (1989), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, concerns itself with the author's adolescence in Seattle and then Newhalem, a remote company town in the North Cascade mountains of Washington State. The memoir describes the nomadic and uncertain life Wolff and his mother experienced after the divorce of Wolff's parents and then his mother's subsequent marriage to an abusive husband and stepfather. In Pharaoh's Army (1994) records Wolff's U.S. Army tour of duty in Vietnam. A third collection of stories, The Night in Question, was published in 1997. Our Story Begins, a collection of new and previously-published stories, appeared in 2008.
Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, Wolff's prose is characterized by an exploration of personal/biographical and existential terrain. As Wyatt Mason wrote in the London Review of Books, "Typically, his protagonists face an acute moral dilemma, unable to reconcile what they know to be true with what they feel to be true. Duplicity is their great failing, and Wolff's main theme." He has also spoken of the personal nature of his work elsewhere: "I have to be able, with a straight face, to tell myself that something is nonfiction if I say it's nonfiction. That's why, although there are autobiographical elements in some of my stories, I still call them fiction because that's what they are. Even though they may have been set into motion by some catalyst of memory."
In 1989, Wolff was chosen as recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Wolff has received the O. Henry Award on three occasions, for the stories "In the Garden of North American Martyrs" (1981), "Next Door" (1982), and "Sister" (1985). In 2008, he was awarded The Story Prize for Our Story Begins.
Film
Wolff's work has found a wider audience through its adaptation to film. This Boy's Life became a feature film directed by Michael Caton-Jones which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Ellen Barkin.
In 2001, Wolff's acclaimed short story "Bullet in the Brain" was adapted into a short film by David Von Ancken and CJ Follini starring Tom Noonan and Dean Winters.
Family
Tobias Wolff's older brother is the author Geoffrey Wolff. A decade before Tobias Wolff wrote This Boy's Life, his brother wrote a memoir of his own about the boys' biological father, entitled The Duke of Deception.
Wolff's mother, having settled in Washington, D.C., eventually became president of the League of Women Voters.
Tobias Wolff is married and lives with his wife, Catherine Dolores Spohn, and three children in California.
Awards and honors
- 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Barracks Thief
- 1989 Whiting Award for Fiction and Nonfiction
- 2006 PEN/Malamud Award (co-winner)
- 2008 The Story Prize
- 2014 Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Oregon State University
- 2015 National Medal of Arts, US National Endowment for the Arts
Bibliography
Novels
- Ugly Rumours (1975) ISBN 0048231177
- The Barracks Thief (1984) (novella) ISBN 0-88001-049-5
- Old School (2003) ISBN 0-375-40146-6
Collections
- In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981) ISBN 0-88001-497-0
- Hunters in the Snow (1981)
- Back in the World (1985)
- The Collected Short Stories ISBN 0-7475-3153-6
- The Night in Question (1997) ISBN 0-679-78155-2
- Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008) ISBN 978-1-4000-4459-7
Edited volumes
- Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories (1983) ISBN 0-931694-17-5
- Best American Short Stories (1994)
- The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (1994) ISBN 0-679-74513-0
Non-fiction
- This Boy's Life (1989), a memoir about his boyhood in the 1950s ISBN 0-8021-3668-0
- In Pharaoh's Army (1994), a memoir about his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War. ISBN 0-679-76023-7
Short fiction
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