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Tobias Wolff Writer of fiction and memoir; longtime academic and teacher

Tobias Wolff

Biography Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff traveled the country with his peripatetic mother, finally settling in Washington State, where he grew up. As a scholarship student, he attended the Hill School in Pennsylvania until he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics in his final year, whereupon he joined the Army. He spent four years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam. Following his discharge he attended Oxford University in England, where he received a First Class Honours degree in English in 1972. Returning to the United States, he worked variously as a reporter, a night watchman, a waiter and a high school teacher before receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1975. He is currently Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, where he lives with his wife Catherine. They have three children.

Tobias Wolff’s books include the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army; the short novel The Barracks Thief; three collections of stories, In The Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question; and, most recently, the novel Old School. A new collection, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, will be published in April, 2008. He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories, A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Stories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Fairfax Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, the PEN/Malamud Award for Achievement in the Short Story, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Upcoming Works

Relationship

  • Married

Family

  • Three children

Causes I Support

  • American Red Cross
    International Red Cross

University Affiliation

  • Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University

Agents

  • Amanda Urban

Contact Agents

  • International Creative Management
    825 Eighth Avenue
    New York, NY 10019

Publishers

  • Bantam Classics
    Grove Press
    HarperCollins
    Harper Perennial
    Harvest Books
    Houghton Mifflin
    Knopf
    Random House
    Vintage

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