Tobias Wolff

American short-story writer and novelist

• Born: June 19, 1945
• Place of Birth: Birmingham, Alabama

Biography

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff is one of the most highly respected writers of short fiction to have achieved prominence in the 1980s. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 19, 1945, the son of Arthur and Rosemary (Loftus) Wolff, and grew up in the state of Washington, where he and his mother had moved some six years after his parents’ divorce in 1951. Wolff left his home in rural Washington to attend preparatory school at the Hill School in Pennsylvania but failed to graduate. After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Special Forces, serving from 1964 to 1968, during which time he served in Vietnam, Wolff earned a bachelor’s degree from Oxford University in 1972 and a master’s degree from Oxford in 1975. He spent the 1975–76 academic year at Stanford University, having won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in creative writing. He earned a master’s degree from Stanford in 1978, the same year he received his first National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Like many other contemporary writers, Wolff has supported himself by teaching. He has served on the faculties of Stanford University, Goddard College, Arizona State University, and Syracuse University and has been a reporter for The Washington Post. Wolff published his first collection of stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, in 1981. The book received exceptional reviews, and the following year, it earned Wolff the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction. In the stories’ range of characters, situations, and literary techniques, this collection revealed Wolff to be a writer not merely of promise but of manifest achievement as well.

Wolff’s second book, the novella The Barracks Thief (1984), confirmed his narrative gifts. Originally a novel-length manuscript, it was subjected to intense revision that eliminated inessential characters and unnecessary passages of exposition and introduced greater complexity of narrative technique—including Wolff’s startling yet successful shifts from third-person to first-person points of view. Widely admired by reviewers, The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1985 as the best work of fiction published during the preceding year. The year 1985 also saw the publication of Wolff’s second collection of stories, Back in the World (1985). Frequently set in California or the Pacific Northwest, the stories in this volume use third-person points of view that distance the reader from the characters. Although this collection did not generate as enthusiastic a response from reviewers as did Wolff’s first two books, it continued to develop several of his characteristic themes and situations.

Following the publication of Back in the World, Wolff went on to publish The Barracks Thief, and Selected Stories, a volume that reprints six of the twelve stories from his first collection, The Night in Question (1997), another short-story collection, and This Boy’s Life (1989), an autobiographical memoir. In vivid, often humorous, sometimes painful scenes, Wolff’s memoir recounts his experiences from age ten through enrollment at Hill School. With utter candor, he records the duplicity with which he created an assortment of identities and describes his complex relationship with his stepfather. The book’s major strengths are its honesty, hopefulness amid disillusionment, and repudiation of self-pity. This Boy's Life won the Whiting Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography, both in 1989. That same year, Wolff received the 1989 Rea Award for the Short Story.

This Boy’s Life was made into a film starring Robert De Niro. Although Wolff disliked the film’s gratuitous sex scene, he had little other criticism, stating that the film reinvented him the way he had reinvented himself from memories. In Pharoah’s Army (1994), a memoir of Wolff’s Vietnam years, received mixed reviews. A few considered it pale compared with This Boy’s Life, but most critics hailed In Pharoah’s Army as an unflinching depiction of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with himself. Nonetheless, the book was a National Book Award finalist.

In an essay on the fiction of Paul Bowles, Wolff describes the characters of Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky (1949) as “refugees of a sort peculiar to our age: affluent drifters dispossessed spiritually rather than materially.” The same might be said of many of Wolff’s characters. Against what Wolff calls, in the same essay, “that voice in each of us that sings the delight of not being responsible, of refusing the labor of choice by which we create ourselves,” Wolff seeks to bring his characters into the realm of responsibility, where questions of good and evil, justice and injustice, are central. His stories—written in a style marked by clarity, grace, and an unpretentious metaphorical richness—take their place in the tradition of realism, not among the metafictions of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and John Barth.

Some of Wolff’s fiction assumes the shape of moral parable, as in the title story of his first collection and in “The Rich Brother,” the concluding story in Back in the World, with its fablelike opening and its affirmation of the responsibilities that brotherhood imposes. Other stories, such as “Next Door” and “The Liar,” the opening and closing pieces in his first book, culminate in visionary glimpses of a world that impinges on ordinary reality but rarely coincides with it, a world of tranquillity, love, and compassion. Yet despite the clear ethical concerns of his stories, Wolff often complicates the moral judgments of his readers. In The Barracks Thief, for example, the novella’s shifting narrative perspectives enlist the readers’ sympathy for Lewis, the thief. In “Coming Attractions,” a teenage girl who makes a practice of shoplifting and who keeps whatever lost belongings she finds in the movie theater where she works, is shown, at story’s end, struggling selflessly to raise a bicycle from a swimming pool so that she can give it to her younger brother. Such unanticipated acts of generosity occur regularly in Wolff’s fiction, suggesting the mysterious depths of human motivation and the regenerative potential of people’s capacity for change. Although Wolff’s characters are frequently flawed, directionless human beings, Wolff presents many of them in situations in which they discover unsuspected or obscured dimensions of themselves, as does the protagonist of “The Other Miller.” Wolff’s stories, grounded in their author’s belief that “storytelling is one of the sustaining arts,” thus serve to evoke moral and spiritual alternatives to the spiritlessness of so much of contemporary life. They affirm the possibilities of renewal. Wolff’s themes of human frailty, possible regeneration, and moral imperatives reflect a Christian perspective, a vision that haunts rather than pervades his work.

In the early twenty-first century, Wolff published another volume of short stories and his second full-length novel. Our Story Begins reprints stories published in the New Yorker and other magazines with some old favorites, earning Wolff the 2008 Story Prize. His short stories include "Beautiful Girl" (2014), "Powder" (2013), "The Chain" (2013), and "A Death in the Afternoon" (2021). Set at a boys' preparatory school in early 1960s New England, the novel Old School (2003) takes the creation and maintenance of identity as its subject. It was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Prize for fiction and the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. Wolff has also received the 2001 Arts and Letters Award in literature, the 2006 PEN/Malamud Award, and a 2015 National Medal of the Arts.

Author Works

Short Fiction:

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, 1981

Back in the World, 1985

The Stories of Tobias Wolff, 1988

The Night in Question, 1996

Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, 2008

Bible, 2007

All Ahead of Them, 2013

A Death in the Afternoon, 2021

Long Fiction:

Ugly Rumours, 1975

The Barracks Thief, 1984

Old School, 2003

Nonfiction:

This Boy’s Life, 1989

In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, 1994

Edited Texts:

Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories, 1983

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, 1994

The Best American Short Stories, 1994

Best New American Voices, 2000, 2000

Writers Harvest 3, 2000

Bibliography

Challener, Daniel D. Stories of Resilience in Childhood: The Narratives of Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodrigues, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff. Garland, 1997.

Desmond, John F. “Catholicism in Contemporary American Fiction.” America, vol. 170, no. 1, 1994, pp. 7-11.

Hannah, James. Tobias Wolff: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction, no. 64. Twayne, 1996.

Kelly, Colm L. “Affirming the Indeterminable: Deconstruction, Sociology, and Tobias Wolff’s ‘Say Yes.’” Mosaic, vol. 32, Mar. 1999, pp. 149-166.

Prose, Francine. “The Brothers Wolff.” The New York Times Magazine, 5 Feb. 1989, p. 22.

Sherman, Sue. This Boy’s Life: Tobias Wolff. Insight Publications, 2014.

"Tobias Wolff." Stanford University, profiles.stanford.edu/tobias-wolff. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Wolff, Tobias. “An Interview with Tobias Wolff.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 31, spring 1990, pp. 1-16.

Wolff, Tobias. Interview by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Publishers Weekly, vol. 241, 24 Oct. 1994, pp. 45-46.

Wolff, Tobias. "On Childhood." The Threepenny Review, 2021, www.threepennyreview.com/on-childhood-fall-2021. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life: A Memoir. 30th anniversary ed., Grove Press, 2019.