Tobias Wolff | |
|---|---|
 Wolff in 2008 | |
| Born | Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (1945-06-19)June 19, 1945 (age 80) Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Alma mater | Hertford College, Oxford (BA) Stanford University (MA) |
| Genre | Memoir, short story, novel |
| Spouse | Catherine Dolores Spohn (m. 1975; 3 children) |
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing. He is known for his memoirs, particularlyThis Boy's Life (1989) andIn Pharaoh's Army (1994). He has written four short story collections and two novels includingThe Barracks Thief (1984), which won thePEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Wolff received aNational Medal of Arts from PresidentBarack Obama in September 2015.[1]
His academic career began atSyracuse University (1982–1997). Since 1997, he has taught atStanford University, where he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Wolff was born in 1945 inBirmingham, Alabama, the second son of Rosemary (Loftus) from Hartford, Connecticut, and Arthur Samuels Wolff, an aeronautical engineer who was a son of a Jewish doctor and his wife.[2][3] His father had become Episcopalian. Wolff did not learn about his father's Jewish roots until he was an adult. (Wolff was raised and identifies as Catholic, like his mother.)[2][4]
His parents separated when Wolff was five and his elder brotherGeoffrey was twelve. He lived with his mother in a variety of places, including Seattle and Washington when he was an adolescent. After she remarried, they lived inNewhalem, a small company town in theNorth Cascade Mountains, where his stepfather, Robert Thompson, worked forSeattle City Light. His father and brother lived on the East Coast during this period. Geoffrey knew nothing about where his brother was until he entered Princeton.[2]
As a child, Wolff had a local paper route and was a Boy Scout. After attending Concrete High School inConcrete, also in the North Cascades, Wolff applied to and was accepted byThe Hill School, located 35 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had applied under the self-embellished name "Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff III", adopting part of one of his father's personas, Saunders Ansell-Wolff 3d.[2] When Wolff was found to have forged his transcripts and recommendation letters, he was later expelled.[5][better source needed]
Wolff served in theU.S. Army from 1964 to 1968, when he trained for Special Forces, learned Vietnamese, and served as an adviser in Vietnam.[2][5][better source needed] He holds a First Class Honours degree in English fromHertford College, Oxford (1972). After returning to the United States, in 1975, he was awarded aWallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing atStanford University, where he earned anM.A.
While continuing to write, Wolff taught atSyracuse University from 1980 to 1997. He published his first short story collection in 1981. At Syracuse he served on the faculty withRaymond Carver and was an instructor in the graduate writing program. Authors who had studied with Wolff as students at Syracuse includeJay McInerney,Tom Perrotta,George Saunders,[6]Alice Sebold,William Tester, Paul Griner, Ken Garcia, Dana C. Kabel, Jan-Marie Spanard, andPaul Watkins.
In 1997, Wolff transferred to Stanford, where he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He has taught classes in English andcreative writing. He also served as the director of theCreative Writing Program at Stanford from 2000 to 2002.
Wolff is widely known for his work in two genres: the short story and thememoir. 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 been published 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 such as Wolff,Raymond Carver andAndre Dubus became better known, the United States was said to be having a renaissance of the short story. (Their 20th-century North American version of realism was often labelled asDirty realism for its gritty veracity.)
Wolff repudiated this characterization. In 1994, in the introduction toThe 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 novellaThe Barracks Thief won thePEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for 1985. Most of the action takes place atFort Bragg, North Carolina. Three recentparatrooper training graduates are temporarily attached to anairborneinfantry company as they await orders to report toVietnam. 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 oftone andpoint 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 theLos Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, is devoted to the author's adolescence inSeattle andNewhalem, a remotecompany town in theNorth Cascade mountains of Washington. The memoir describes the nomadic and uncertain life Wolff and his mother led after his parents divorced. His mother's subsequent marriage to a man who was revealed as an abusive husband and stepfather deeply affected their lives.In Pharaoh's Army (1994) records Wolff's U.S. Army tour of duty inVietnam.
He published a third collection of stories,The Night in Question, in 1997. His fourth short-story collection,Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008), includes both new and previously published stories.
Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, Wolff's prose is characterized by an exploration of personal/biographical andexistential terrain. As Wyatt Mason wrote in theLondon 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."[7]
Elsewhere Wolff said of the personal nature of his work: "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."[8]
In 1989, Wolff was chosen as recipient of theRea Award for the Short Story. Wolff has received theO. 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 TheStory Prize forOur Story Begins.
Some of Wolff's work has been adapted to film.This Boy's Life was adapted as a feature film directed byMichael Caton-Jones in 1993. It starredLeonardo DiCaprio as the teenage Wolff,Robert De Niro as Wolff's abusive step-father Dwight, andEllen Barkin as Wolff's mother Rosemary.[9]
In 2001, Wolff's acclaimed short story "Bullet in the Brain" (fromThe Night in Question) was adapted as a short film by David Von Ancken and CJ Follini; it starredTom Noonan andDean Winters.
Tobias Wolff's older brother is the authorGeoffrey Wolff. A decade before Tobias Wolff publishedThis Boy's Life, his brother wrote a memoir of his own about the boys' biological father, entitledThe Duke of Deception (in which he alleges his younger brother was named after theToby Jug[10]). Wolff's mother later settled in Washington, D.C. There she became president of theLeague of Women Voters.
Tobias Wolff is married and lives with his wife, Catherine Dolores Spohn, and three children in California.[citation needed]
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| Year | Title | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1976 | Smokers | Wolff, Tobias (December 1976)."Smokers".Atlantic Monthly. | Collected inIn the Garden of the North American Martyrs | First published short story. |
| 1988 | Fortune | Wolff, Tobias (Summer 1988). "Fortune".Granta.24 (Inside Intelligence). | ||
| 1993 | Memorial | Wolff, Tobias (Summer 1993). "Memorial".Granta.44 (The Last Place on Earth). | ||
| 1995 | Bullet in the Brain | Wolff, Tobias (September 25, 1995)."Bullet in the Brain".The New Yorker. | Collected inThe Night in Question. Reprinted inSedaris, David, ed. (2005).Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Simon & Schuster.ISBN 0-7432-7612-4. | |
| 2007 | Bible | Wolff, Tobias (August 2007)."Bible".The Atlantic. | Collected inOur Story Begins. | |
| 2013 | All Ahead of Them | Wolff, Tobias (July 8–15, 2013)."All Ahead of Them".The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 20. pp. 74–79. |
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