Tobias Wolff

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff was born on June 19, 1945, in Birmingham, Alabama. His parents divorced when he was five, leading him to live with his mother in various locations, including Seattle, Washington, where she later remarried. His adolescence with an abusive stepfather during this period became the subject of his widely recognized memoir, “This Boy’s Life” (1989), which was later adapted into a successful film in 1993. His early experiences shaped much of his later writing, providing a foundation for his exploration of personal struggle and resilience.

Wolff served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1968, training for Special Forces and serving as an adviser in Vietnam. Following his military service, he pursued higher education, earning a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford (1972) and an M.A. from Stanford University (1975), where he was also awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing. He began his academic teaching career at Syracuse University in 1980, remaining there until 1997. During his tenure, he published his first short story collection, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” in 1981, and his novella “The Barracks Thief” (1984), which secured the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1985.

In 1997, Wolff joined Stanford University as the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, teaching English and creative writing. He also directed the Creative Writing Program at Stanford from 2000 to 2002. His career is marked by continuous literary output, including further short story collections like “Back in the World” (1985) and “The Night in Question” (1997), and the memoir “In Pharaoh’s Army” (1994), detailing his Vietnam War experiences. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts, acknowledging his significant contributions to American literature.