Tobias Wolff

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Tobias Wolff bigraphy, stories - Fiction writer, memoirist

Tobias Wolff : biography

June 19, 1945 –

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American author. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy’s Life (1989), and his short stories. He has also written two novels.

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 and University of California, Irvine professor Geoffrey Wolff. A decade before Wolff wrote This Boy’s Life, Geoffrey 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 has three children.

Life and career

Wolff was born in 1945, in Birmingham, Alabama, the son of Rosemary (Loftus) and Arthur Samuels Wolff, an aeronautical engineer.http://www.notablebiographies.com/newsmakers2/2005-Pu-Z/Wolff-Tobias.html Wolff’s father was from a Jewish background, though Wolff did not discover that until he was an adult (Wolff himself is Catholic).http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/05/magazine/the-brothers-wolff.html?pagewanted=all&src=pmhttp://www.neabigread.org/books/oldschool/readers04.php 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 was later expelled.End notes for This Boy’s Life He served in the US 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 University, 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, Jan–Marie Spanard and Paul Watkins.

Awards and honors

  • 2006 PEN/Malamud Award (co-winner)

Partial bibliography

  • Ugly Rumours (1975), a novel.
  • In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), a collection of short stories. ISBN 0-88001-497-0
  • Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories (1983), editor. ISBN 0-931694-17-5
  • The Barracks Thief (1984), a novella. ISBN 0-88001-049-5
  • Back in the World (1985), a collection of short stories.
  • This Boy’s Life (1989), a memoir, later made into a film, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. ISBN 0-8021-3668-0
  • Best American Short Stories (1994), editor.
  • The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (1994), editor. ISBN 0-679-74513-0
  • In Pharaoh’s Army (1994), a memoir about his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War. ISBN 0-679-76023-7
  • The Collected Short Stories ISBN 0-7475-3153-6
  • The Night in Question (1997), a collection of short stories. ISBN 0-679-78155-2
  • Old School (2003), a novel about a student attending an elite boarding school. ISBN 0-375-40146-6.
  • Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008), a collection of ten new and twenty-one old stories. ISBN 978-1-4000-4459-7
  • "Awake" (2008), short story appears in The Sunday Times ()