Tobias Wolff

American · born 1945

Tobias Jonathan Wolff was born on June 19, 1945, in Birmingham, Alabama, and endured the rootless, hard-luck childhood he would later turn into a masterwork of American memoir. His parents divorced when he was five, splitting the family: his older brother Geoffrey stayed east with their father, a charming con man who would become the subject of Geoffrey's own memoir, while Tobias moved west with his mother, chasing a series of jobs and men, eventually landing in the small mill town of Concrete, Washington under the roof of an abusive stepfather. At sixteen he forged his way into a Pennsylvania prep school under an invented, aristocratic-sounding name, only to be expelled within the year for failing grades and drinking. He enlisted in the Army instead, trained for the Special Forces, learned Vietnamese, and served as an adviser to South Vietnamese troops before his discharge in 1968. On the strength of more forged recommendations, he talked his way into Oxford, earning a First in English from Hertford College in 1972. He taught creative writing for seventeen years at Syracuse University, mentoring a generation of American short story writers, before moving to Stanford in 1997, where he still teaches. His own fiction, spare and morally exacting, won him the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Barracks Thief in 1985, but it was This Boy's Life, his 1989 memoir of that Pacific Northwest boyhood, that made him famous and remains his most widely read book. He followed it with In Pharaoh's Army, a second memoir centered on his year in Vietnam, and the campus novel Old School. In 2015 President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts. He has been married to Catherine Dolores Spohn since 1975, and the couple raised three children.